Last week, Tony Ruscoe found an interesting reference to Salesforce in a CSS file used by Google Apps. According to the company, "Salesforce.com is the worldwide leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) services. More companies trust their vital customer and sales data to salesforce.com than any other on-demand CRM company in the world."Other people found references to Google products in Salesforce's applications: a button to compose a message in Gmail and a button for Google Docs, so the integration is probably in the final stages. "Openness is a virtue – the best CRM and the best online productivity suite are lined up for a deep integration", thinks Steve Andersen.
In June 2007, Google signed a partnership with Salesforce to include Google AdWords in its applications, but Wall Street Journal speculated that the result "could be a Web-based offering that integrates some of Google's online services such as email and instant-messaging with those of Salesforce.com, whose customer-relationship management tools help salespeople track their accounts." Maybe this year Wall Street Journal's prediction comes true.