Qualifying Sales Leads

What an exciting week between Google and Salesforce! Let's recap with our perspective on Monday’s announcement event, and Wednesday’s Tour de Force marketing stop in New York City. A few overall observations:

• Expanding awareness: It’s clear that the market is starting to understand the power of platform as a service. Between Marc Benioff’s continuing evangelism of Force.com, Google’s campfire event in Mountain View to launch their AppEngine, and all the discussion this week about bringing Salesforce and Google together, companies are starting to think more broadly about how to combine the capabilities of Salesforce and Google. In our conversations with customers this week, there was more excitement than ever about the types of applications that are now possible.
• Expanding vision: The broader idea that’s starting to emerge from all these conversations is a vision for a new generation of applications that are now possible in the space between structured business applications like CRM, and completely unstructured business activity like email. This is a theme Google CEO Eric Schmidt touched on Monday that we’ll be returning to on this blog frequently.
• Role of partners: The importance the partners of Salesforce and Google to help customers make the most of these capabilities is becoming increasingly clear. A proof point is the role played by that partners in Monday’s Google announcement, and in the Tour de Force events. Salesforce and Google relied on their partner ecosystem to provide so much of the functionality powering Salesforce for Google Apps. This is a tremendous vote of confidence.

Much of the positioning around the announcement has been as a "Dream Come True." We agree! And we look forward to working with our customers and partners to make all this a reality in your enterprise. Until then, enjoy the sweets from Monday's announcement (below).

Narinder Sighn