Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

More rumors of a Google buyout of Salesforce has been rumbling, especially as Salesforce helps upsell Google's apps to enterprises.  Some people are calling for Google to make the buyout.  I think it's a great idea.  Google's utter dependence on advertisements for money is their boon and bane.  Naturally with their various applications like documents, spreadsheets, presentation, calendar, maps, search, APIs, etc. and of course their recent announcement of their application engine, Google's platform is ready for prime time in the enterprise.  Monetizing it outside of the smaller customer though has been a traditional problem with Google as they have been unwilling to provide the support to potentially paying customers in really getting more people to adopt their platforms.

I haven't delved into detail in terms of Salesforce's applications to see what they offer that will compliment Google's applications.  However, when I think at the enterprise level of what people need or even desire, you boil down to the following list:

• Email/mail server
• Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Database
• Single sign on
• Presentation
• Calendar
• Document repository (wiki)
  
• Project management tool
• Code repository (for those with IT/development departments)
• CRM
• Bug/issue/trouble ticket tracking
• Employee/company blogs
• Budgeting tool
• Discussion forums
• Inventory management
• Vacation/holiday/time tracking
• Software deployment tool
• Entitlements management
• Code promotion
• Testing tools (for those with QA departments)

Certainly, this is not an exhaustive list.  But at the moment, the combined Google and Salesforce would probably meet a good majority of these.  I think startups could do well to leverage the foundation laid by Google.  You do get into vendor tie up with Google, but I don't think in this case it's that bad.