SalesForce for Google Apps

Salesforce.com and Google have just announced a strategic partnership called “SalesForce for Google Apps”. You can read more about it here and here, but in a nutshell it means that Salesforce customers will be leveraging Google productivity and collaboration tools (such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs) from directly within the SaleForce application.

Why do I care?

In a nutshell, this partnership will further highlight the need for seamless identity integration between the enterprise and their SaaS vendors, as well as seamless identity integration between the SaaS vendors themselves. By identity integration I am talking both Secure Internet SSO (Federation) as well as User Provisioning.

This is big news from a Ping Identity perspective as it aligns with our strategic vision to address the security issues that arise from the de-perimeterization of the enterprise via SaaS. While our PingFederate product already supports SSO to both SalesForce.com and Google Apps, one of the reasons for our SXIP Access acquisition was to accelerate the ability for PingFederate to also support user provisioning between the enterprise directory and the SalesForce.com and Google Apps applications. Imagine using PingFederate to automatically synchronize user accounts between your directory and both SalesForce.com and Google Apps, while also offering SSO !!!