Salesforce and Google lock arms

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What could be a nicer starting point to publish the first ever blog post on unforced.de than Salesforce Dreamforce 2017 in San Francisco? Time is short, as I have to watch some live streams :) But here's some big news and my personal highlight of Dreamforce day 1...

Today CEO Marc Benioff announced a strategic partnership with Alphabet Inc.'s Google, naming Google Cloud a "preferred" public cloud provider.

Salesforce has to continously expand and improve its international SaaS infrastructure. It has to ensure the high performance and availability of its services. A share price increase of almost 3% to 105$ after hours indicates that investors expect Salesforce to be able to lower its costs and provide room to manoeuvre in the negotiations with Amazon.

Particularly interesting for startups and companies building up their business on leading Saas platforms: Google will offer G suite licences at no additional cost for up to one year! Plus: Salesforce customers can expect an easier integration with G Suite and Google Analytics in the future.

Since Microsoft has taken over LinkedIn and integrated parts of it into the Outlook suite, the relationship between CEOs Marc Benioff and Satya Nadella seems to have cooled down. In contrast, Salesforce has made further efforts in Winter '18 to better integrate Gmail and Google Calendar.

What do you think? Will this announcement considerably change the balance of power between leading SaaS providers Salesforce (CRM), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT)?

Looking forward to your thoughts...

Stay tuned!
Ben

P.S. For more details please have a close look at the partnership announcement or the partnership website.

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