Meet the cloud’s newest strategic partners: Salesforce and Google. The two companies announced a deal at Dreamforce late yesterday, with Google Cloud becoming Salesforce’s preferred public cloud provider alongside new product integrations.
There were four primary integrations announced. Salesforce Lightning for Gmail enables users to surface Salesforce CRM data in Gmail, as well as customer interactions from Gmail directly within Salesforce. Lightning for Sheets allows the Google spreadsheet tool to be embedded anywhere in Salesforce, while Quip – the word processing and productivity app bought by Salesforce last year – will be able to integrated with Google Drive and Calendar. Salesforce will also integrate with Hangouts.
“Our partnership with Google represents the best of both worlds for our customers,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a statement, “There has never been an easier way for companies to run their entire business in the cloud – from productivity apps, email and analytics, to sales, service and marketing apps, this partnership will help make our customers smarter and more productive.”
“Our teams are working very closely to develop new integrations that will connect Salesforce CRM with G Suite to offer the only cloud-native collaboration platform of its kind,” wrote Nan Boden, Google Cloud head of global technology partners in a blog post.
“We hope this partnership enables more companies to take advantage of the cloud and that the combined solutions will provide an unmatched experience for customers,” added Boden.
Salesforce naturally has plenty of other strategic partners in place. In March, the company signed up with IBM in what was described as a ‘landmark global strategic partnership’ focusing around artificial intelligence (AI), an area which Benioff is certainly tuned into. At IBM’s InterConnect event in Las Vegas that month, Benioff joined IBM CEO Ginni Rometty on stage to discuss their shared initiatives.
The company signed a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) last year stating the Seattle giant as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. According to Business Insider, Salesforce will still work with AWS in some capacity but Google has ‘taken some of its territory.’
For Google’s part, this represents another win in a year laden with them. According to financial results back in July, the company tripled the number of its big cloud deals – ranked as $0.5 million or above – year over year. Among its more recent customers, as announced at Google’s Next conference in San Francisco in March, include Verizon, Colgate-Palmolive, and eBay – three companies listed in the most recent Fortune 500.