Salesforce.com: Integration with IBM LotusLive Complements Google Apps Pact

When IBM unveiled Salesforce.com as an integration partner for its forthcoming LotusLive suite of software-as-a-service collaboration enterprise applications at Lotusphere Jan. 19, the move was a bit of a head-scratcher for some who closely watch the cloud computing space.

LotusLive includes Web conferencing, social networking, messaging and other tools to help enterprise users work together on projects. IBM hosts LotusLive on its servers and lets partners deliver the application to their customers over the Internet.

Yet Salesforce.com has spent the last several months getting cozier with Google Apps, the SAAS collaboration suite the search giant hosts and pipes over the Internet to customers in cloud computing fashion.

Last April, Salesforce.com, which delivers SAAS CRM applications to customers, launched Salesforce.com for Google Apps.

This integration lets Salesforce.com customers use Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and the Google Docs spreadsheet, presentations and word processing applications from within the Salesforce.com platform.

Plainly, Salesforce.com is supporting competing platforms in Google Apps and IBM LotusLive.

Noticing this, a Lotusphere attendee asked eWEEK whether or not Salesforce.com's new agreement with IBM, in which Salesforce.com customers will be able to leverage IBM's LotusLive tools from their CRM applications to improve customer interactions, means that the Google-Salesforce.com pact is on the rocks.

Not so, Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at Salesforce.com, told eWEEK Jan. 22 in a phone interview. Gross said he could understand how the similarity between the LotusLive suite and Google Apps might lead people to assume that Salesforce.com was elbowing Google aside for IBM.

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