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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.
IBM, Google Can Coexist at Salesforce.com
Pointing out that Salesforce.com has supported IBM Lotus Notes since 2006, Gross said, “We’re going to go where our customers are, with the features that our customers like. I don’t think [Salesforce.com] or IBM or Google think there is going to be one set of services that will completely dominate the market. That’s why we support Outlook, Lotus Notes [and] now LotusLive, and obviously we have a strategic relationship with Google.”
Gross explained that while some people believe the cloud computing ecosystem will be led by one or two strong players, the cloud will actually be as rich and diverse as the client/server architecture that filled the war chests of companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, and thousands of others.
That belief explains why Salesforce.com has partnered with so many vendors in the cloud, including IBM, Google, Facebook and Amazon Web Services. Gross added, “We want to provide excellent interoperability and common experiences with market-leading services because it benefits our customers. If Microsoft wants to build on Force.com, we’ll welcome them. You never know, stranger things have happened.”
Accordingly, Gross was thrilled that IBM and Salesforce.com are working together, he said: What’s exciting about LotusLive is that a company the size of IBM coming in to the market is a win for the whole industry.
Even so, Sean Poulley, vice president of online collaboration at IBM, who is taking the LotusLive lead, said he believes IBM is the best fit for Salesforce.com over Google or anyone else.
Google and Salesforce.com, Poulley said, connect through Google Docs, but LotusLive strives to enable collaboration in the context of a whole business process. Poulley told eWEEK at Lotusphere: “So, you’re my customer and he’s my partner and we’re trying to sell to you and I might want to look you up and we might want to start a meeting together and out of the meeting I might want to take a document and store it somewhere. It’s not connecting stuff for the sake of connecting, it’s augmenting the process of selling.”
Google beware. As much as Salesforce.com aims to strike the Switzerland chord, IBM might not be displacing you today, but it’s definitely gunning for you in the broader market in the future.