Salesforce and Google have announced a major extension to their existing partnership, which will see much deeper integrations. It will not, however, place Google in a preferred position above AWS as a public cloud provider.
“This is the best of both worlds for our mutual customers,” said Ryan Aytay, EVP Business Development and Strategic Accounts at Salesforce. “The partnership is focused on four key areas.”
The first is a much deeper integration between Salesforce and Google G Suite, Google’s productivity and team collaboration services.
“Expanding what we have been doing around G Suite and Salesforce will drive a deeper level of integration,” Aytay said. “We have had email and calendar level integration with some other folks, but we are going deeper here, and having a co-engineered solution is part of that.
The collaboration will enhance collaboration between Salesforce Lightning and Quip, and Gmail, Hangouts Meet, Google Calendar, Drive, Docs and Sheets.
“This is incredibly exciting for us because you take two products that people use every day all day long and bring them closer together,” said Mike Rosenbaum, EVP of CRM Apps at Salesforce. “Bringing them closer together will add a lot of productivity and enhanced user experience for both customer bases.”
“This is the first time that Google has done this kind of seamless integration with a vendor like us,” said Bob Stutz, CEO Marketing Cloud, and Chief Analytics Officer at Salesforce. “It’s been our number one ask from customers.”
The initial integrations stemming from the expanded partnership include: Connect Salesforce with G Suite; Salesforce Lightning for Gmail; Salesforce Lightning for Google Sheets; Quip Live Apps for Google Drive and Google Calendar; Salesforce for Hangouts Meet; Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360; and Salesforce Sales Cloud and Google Analytics 360.
The second key area is integrating Salesforce analytics with Google analytics.
“This joins CRM data and our analytics data all in one place,” said Paul Muret, VP Display, Video and Analytics at Google. “I was part of the original Google analytics team. In those early days, it was really a silo inside an organization. It wasn’t connected to anything. That has completely changed. The biggest ask now is to bring offline and online data together. This partnership enables that, and signals a new direction for all marketers around the world.”
Thirdly, Google Cloud Platform has been named a Salesforce Preferred Public Cloud Provider. This one seems more like a marketing announcement, as it doesn’t impact Salesforce’s other cloud relationships.
“AWS is still a preferred Salesforce cloud provider,” Aytay said. “We have a great relationship with Amazon and nothing changes.”
Fourth, Google has announced that it will focus and standardize on Salesforce. Google will continue to use Salesforce as its preferred CRM provider, while Salesforce will continue to use G Suite as its preferred email and productivity provider.
“Customers have asked us for tighter integration with Salesforce – not just the light touch integrations we have been doing, but engineering solutions,” said Tariq Shaukat, Google’s President of Partners and Industry Platforms. “We are naming Salesforce as a preferred user because we are super excited about the new experience.”
As part of the partnering, Google is offering eligible Salesforce customers company-wide G Suite licenses at no additional cost for up to one year.
“This will give Salesforce customers who are new to Google access, so they can really try this out,” Shaukat said.
Several integrations between G Suite and Salesforce are available now. These include Salesforce Lightning for Gmail, and integrations with Calendar and Google Drive. Deeper integrations are expected to start rolling out in 2018.
Quip Live Apps integration with Google Drive is expected to be generally available in the first half of 2018 with any Quip Enterprise License, for $25 per user, per month.
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.
