Salesforce deepens ties with Google with integrations and commitment to Google Cloud Platform infrastructure
Salesforce and Google announced a “new strategic partnership” at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
The wide-ranging partnership includes deeper integration between Salesforce’s SaaS CRM and Google’s popular productivity software G Suite, direct integration between Salesforce and Google Analytics, and a commitment from Salesforce to Google Cloud Platform infrastructure for its international expansion.
During a press conference following the announcement of the partnership, Ryan Aytay, EVP business development and strategic accounts at Salesforce said that the integration of G Suite and Salesforce, as well as Google Analytics and Salesforce products, was one of the most regularly requested from enterprise customers.
Mutual customers of the two vendors will be able to surface information held within Salesforce Lightning and Quip within Gmail, Hangouts Meet, Google Calendar, Drive, Docs and Sheets.
And for customers not using the two products right now Salesforce is extending an offer to “select customers” to get started with G Suite at no charge for up to one year.
Some integrations between G Suite and Salesforce are already live, including Salesforce Lightning for Gmail, and integrations with Calendar and Google Drive. Deeper integrations are expected to start rolling out in 2018.
Salesforce has also named Google Cloud as “a preferred public cloud provider to support the company’s rapidly growing global customer base”. Salesforce announced that it “plans to use Google Cloud Platform for its core services as part of the company’s international infrastructure expansion”.
Google, in return, will continue to use Salesforce as its preferred CRM for selling its cloud services.
Salesforce only just announced that it had selected Amazon Web Services as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider for “international infrastructure expansion” in May 2016. It will continue to run on AWS in Canada and Australia and to run cloud application platform Heroku, IoT Cloud and other services on AWS, but appears to be committed to Google Cloud from here on out when it comes to international expansion, as the company moves to a multi-cloud strategy.
This naturally raised a number of questions during a press conference regarding Salesforce’s relationship with other public cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and its popular Office suite, which integrates somewhat with Salesforce apps already.
Responding to questions, Aytay said that AWS is also a preferred provider, but Google Cloud Platform is the preferred partner for new regions. “We find it useful to have multiple technology partners,” he added.
The companies will also integrate Salesforce with Google Analytics, giving mutual customers, and most significantly Marketing Cloud users, the ability to connect sales, marketing and advertising data held in their CRM with Google Analytics 360.
For example, a marketer will be able to create customised audience segments in Analytics 360 and push them to Marketing Cloud for activation in direct marketing channels such as email and mobile, for the first time.
As part of the press release, Sridhar Ramaswamy, senior vice president of ads and commerce at Google said: “Google and Salesforce are coming together to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing our customersconnecting the insights in their CRM with the rich data in their analytics. For the first time ever, our customers will be able to seamlessly connect what’s happening across sales, marketing and advertising, and take action across our ads platforms and Salesforce.”
Speaking during the press conference, Paul Muret, vice president display, video ads and analytics at Google said this is the first time Google Analytics has directly integrated with an enterprise software maker.
“Over the years, the number one ask I’ve got from large advertisers and marketers is to combine our offline and online data together, help them get a single view of customers journeys. This partnership today really enables that,” Muret added.
The integrations between Salesforce and Google Analytics 360 are expected to begin to arrive in the first half of 2018 and will be offered at no additional cost.
IDG News Service
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