Google, Salesforce.com, and Other SaaS Acts

Google Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. introduced new products and services that are a result of their expanded global strategic alliance. In other news, Microsoft Corp. confirmed it intends to release a SaaS suite while SAP AG may be having SaaS problems

Focal Points:

• Google and Salesforce.com unveiled an expansion of their global strategic alliance by announcing Salesforce for Google Apps. The combination of the Google Apps suite of productivity applications and the Salesforce suite of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications enables businesses to effectively communicate and collaborate without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain, according to the companies. The new offering leverages the Force.com platform and Google's open application programming interfaces (APIs). Salesforce for Google Apps is available today to Salesforce.com's customers at no additional charge. The company will also be offering Salesforce for Google Apps Supported, a package that includes integrated telephone end user support, unified billing and provisioning, enhanced platform APIs, additional third party applications, and advanced Google Apps functionality for $10 per user per month. This package is currently scheduled to be available during the summer of 2008.
• The base Salesforce for Google Apps includes four major components. Salesforce and Gmail provides businesses with the ability tie e-mail capabilities to the sales CRM processes. Salesforce and Google Docs allows for instant document, presentation, and spreadsheet collaboration within the marketing, sales, and sales support organizations.  Salesforce and Google Talk offers instant communications with colleagues or customers and provides the ability to attach these conversations to customer or prospect records. Salesforce and Google Calendar gives marketing and sales teams a common place to store campaign and task activities.
• Microsoft confirmed it would soon release a beta version of a collection of subscription-based software that resembles a lightweight Web version of its popular Office productivity applications. Code-named "Albany," the suite enables users to store and share documents with other networked users from a single interface. As Experton Group had predicted last year, Wall Street analysts are discovering SAP's Business ByDesign SaaS offering may face some fundamental architectural challenges. The software was not built as a single data model as required for this SaaS offering and adoption of the existing structure is proving quite difficult. One analyst's due diligence suggests that SAP may have a major update to Business ByDesign later this year to attempt to address these issues.

Experton Group believes the continued integration of offerings among SaaS providers will enable vendors to bring advanced products to market sooner but will increase the risks for business executives that subscribe to them. Business and IT will not have a single "throat to choke" in these environments and the ability to fix problems that arise in a timely manner will be a challenge. An additional exposure will be the privacy and security of corporate data, as it may exist and live longer in more places than recognized and/or expected by company executives. IT executives should do a thorough vetting of any SaaS offering to ensure they know the full set of providers involved in the service, roles each is playing, rules regarding corporate data, and the accountability and responsibility of each organization.