Salesforce and Google alliance in the works

The Wall Street Journal is reporting  on a forthcoming alliance between salesforce.com and Google to integrate Google's online services, such as email and IM, with the salesforce platform. It wouldn't be much of a surprise given that salesforce.com has become a platform company that enables integration of Web services and external applications, including Google Docs & Spreadsheets (see below) and Microsoft applications.

What will be different this time is that salesforce.com, and Google, will actively promote the partnership as part of an ongoing effort to become the 21st century applications platform, delivered from the cloud, hoping to leave Microsoft in the dust. It's early in the game of transitioning enterprise applications to on demand platforms. 'SalesGoog' won't convince enterprises to throw out Microsoft Exchange tomorrow, but having more applications, tightly integrated, delivered from the cloud will become hard to resist over time. Salesforce.com declined to comment on the Google relationship.