Salesforce.com Gets More Googley

Now word is expected on Tuesday, although Salesforce.com PR won't admit the news involves Google

Smart money is that software-as-a-service pioneer Salesforce.com will tout integration between its own hosted SFA wares and Google Apps. The company, along with NetSuite and others already team with Google on AdWords tie ins with their respective wares.

When Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was talking up the AdWords integration last August, he waxed positively poetic on Google Apps so if apps integration is what's in store Tuesday, it should come as no surprise.

Of course it would also make huge sense for Salesforce.com to take advantage of Google's recently announced Google Gears toolset for bringing offline capabilities to SaaS software but let's focus on Apps integration for now. Google, natch, will want every vendor to tie into its apps and it's quite likely that everyone, at least everyone in the Anyone But Microsoft (ABM) crew, will do so.

One software exec says Google Apps integration will become the new least-common-denominator among the software-as-a-service and even the plain ol' software gang, much as integration with Microsoft Outlook is now. And this, of course,is of huge concern to Microsoft which is already Google-smacked to distraction.

Now, back to offline. Salesforce.com offers some offline capability but only with its pricier Enterprise and Unlimited editions. That's caused griping even among faithful users who remember the pain caused by last year's service outages.

Here's a customer post to the company blog on this topic:

Google could bring a lot to Salesforce.com and Salesforce.com could help legitimize Google to business customers who might still regard Google as a pure consumer phenom. Google is seeking to move its Web dominance inside corporate firewalls with its Search Appliances and is pushing beyond its ad-supprted roots with a for-pay version of the aforementioned Google Apps.

So it could be synergies run amuck on Tuesday.

Stay tuned.