Salesforce annoints Google its 'preferred public cloud provider'

Google and Salesforce to tighten integration between Salesforce and Google's G Suite team collaboration services

Salesforce has unveiled a strategic partnership with Google that will see Salesforce hawk Google's G Suite to its customers, offering them the full stack of Google cloud services tightly integrated with Salesforce's own core technology.

The announcement was made at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, California, last night. The two companies claim that it will enable a "smarter, more collaborative experience for customers".

The announcement was revealed as Salesforce declared Google Cloud Platform its "preferred public cloud provider".

The deal, Salesforce claimed, will help support the company's growing customer base across the world as it uses Google's platform for its core services as part of its international infrastructure expansion.

The partnership will also see the companies offering new integrations between Salesforce and Google's G Suite team collaboration services.

Salesforce claimed that this will "surface powerful customer intelligence" more seamlessly between such services as Salesforce Lightning and Quip, Gmail, Hangouts Meet, and Google Calendar, Drive, Docs and Sheets.

The new deal will enable more than 150,000 existing Salesforce customers to take advantage of productivity gains - if they also use any part of Google's cloud stack - and will also enable customers that are new to Google's productivity and collaboration services to use G Suite at no charge for up to a year.

Speaking at a press conference, Salesforce's executive vice president of CRM apps, Mike Rosenbaun, said: "This is incredibly exciting for us because we're taking two products that millions upon millions of people use every day, all day long, and we're bringing them closer together.

"When you think about something that people spend all day long using, having that really deep integration is something that goes well beyond the level that we are each able to achieve independently with our API service areas. That's going to add a lot of productivity and user experience for both of our customer bases."

Google's vice president of display, video and analytics, Paul Muret, added: "Over the years, the number one 'ask' I've got from large advertisers and marketers is to combine our offline and online data together, help them get a single view of customers' journeys so they can really take action across their test points. This partnership today really enables that: it's the first of its kind and it's a new direction for all markets across the world."

When questioned what the partnership means for Amazon Web Services, whose cloud services Salesforce also uses, Salesforce executive vice president in charge of business development and strategic accounts, Ryan Aytay, said that it would change nothing, but refused to admit whether this new "prefered" cloud solution meant that Amazon would be forced to take a backseat now Google is on board.

Nevertheless, the deal will mean Google will use Salesforce as its preferred CRM provider, while Salesforce in turn will use G Suite as its email and productivity vendor.