Wall Street Journal’s unsubstantiated story is fast becoming rumor of the day on blogosphere. Speculations range from some kind of deal to possible acquisition.

Erik Schwartz on InfoWorld is cautioning on massive changes which can come if this alliance goes through:

“..Rather, all applications are simply part of a pull down menu with users accessing each application as if it were just another feature on the desktop.

If every Web-based app came with Google Apps or something like it, perhaps StarOffice, it would give users the interoperability that they can’t get now from Microsoft Office easily, unless they turn to SAP, which has an integration deal in Duet with Microsoft.”

Jason Maynard thinks acquisition is out of picture but closer relationship is on the cards here.

I think this will have broad implications in the developers market. Salesforce needs Google. Google doesn’t have to accelerate their enterprise penetration at the speed where they need to wake up Oracle, IBM, SAP and tons of other middle level players. That will be too disruptive and will make for a world-against-Google scenario. I doubt Google will be able to afford that level of distraction.

This makes sense at the narrow developer tool level. My guess is Google would like to see their JotSpot acquisition act as a glue software between Google Apps and Salesforce Apex platform. That way Google can approach enterprise market whereas Salesforce can build another defensive layer.

What this means for open source CRM like SugarCRM and CentricCRM? It really comes down to positioning for the SOA world where the economics are increasingly defined by SaaS architecture (Salesforce) and advertisement model (Google). Gmail (Google Apps edition), Google Adwords and Google Analytics are fast becoming must have applications so all open source offerings have to have very tight integration with them to pass through the RFP process.

Technorati Tags: SugarCRM, Salesforce, Salesforce

Technorati Tags: Salesforce, SugarCRM