Search giant Google and on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) provider Salesforce.com have announced further integration of their respective online software offerings.

Google’s online desktop productivity applications – including its online email offering Gmail as well as word-processing and spreadsheet tools – will be embedded directly into Salesforce.com’s CRM application, letting users create and share documents from within their CRM interface.

Google Apps are available free of charge but also as part of a paid-for Premier Edition for the enterprise market. Salesforce.com will effectively become a Google Apps reseller – when its customers opt for the paid-for edition – under the terms of the deal.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said that the move was an explicit attempt to disrupt software giant Microsoft’s near-monopoly in the enterprise software space.

“Certainly the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which makes Google my best friend”, he told the influential Web 2.0-watching blog TechCrunch over the weekend.

Google says that users of its Apps suite number in tens of millions, while Salesforce.com currently has over 1 million individual subscribers using its system.

The latter company recently announced that it expects to earn more than US$1 billion in revenues during 2008. It has lately become the subject of acquisition rumours, with Google and enterprise software giant Oracle, where Benioff made his name, chief among the putative suitors.

Further reading

Salesforce.com on track to break $1 billion barrier

EU whacks Google privacy policy

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