Salesforce Proving Google Wave's Value

(MoneyWatch) 
Salesforce.com, which leaned on the example of Google to argue the merits of Web-based technology in the early days of software-as-a-service (SaaS), is returning the favor by demonstrating the value of Google's Wave application to enterprise customers.

Salesforce.com is demonstrating an integration between its on-demand customer service application and Google's Wave application in a video posted to YouTube. (YouTube is owned by Google. It's funny how that works.) Google Wave is essentially a single Web page that can be used for communicating and sharing all manner of documents and file types, creating a single place where email, chat, video and documents can be dropped into and saved.

This will be a nice addition to Salesforce.com's software-as-a-service (SaaS) call center application, where the company is already seeing significant traction and is adding features as quickly as it did for its flagship customer account management application. But it's a huge deal for Google, which has struggled mightily to gain enterprise adoption and, more importantly, trust. Even to SaaS skeptics, Salesforce.com is at the very least the exception that proves the rule, so its imprimatur on this Google application is a major marketing bonus of Google.

The demonstration shows a number of ways businesses can use the application, including a robot that customers can build to automate certain customer service functions. It also shows how customers can embed all types of media into the Wave, and how their customers can initiate a live chat with a customer service agent. Most importantly from an enterprise perspective, it also demonstrates privacy and security features that are a bare minimum requirement before most customers would ever consider using it as an enterprise tool.

The demonstration also reveals the major drawback to Wave that Google will have to overcome, and that's that end-users will have to initiate the Wave session. In other words, no one will be using this function on Salesforce.com's application suite for a very long time. For this integration to matter to Salesforce.com, its customers will have to serve a fairly large base of sophisticated users, or they won't have any use for this application.

This begs the question of whether Google can get any significant traction for Wave. Thus far, Google has done little to prove it can even get significant market share beyond Web search and email, even at the consumer level. Google Voice and Latitude, however, do show a great deal more promise than, say, Google chat, and it may well be that those applications together with Wave will reinforce each other mutually, in which case Google will be off to the races.

For the time being, though, the Salesforce-Google Wave integration looks more like a way for Salesforce.com to offer a hand to its erstwhile touchstone rather than a serious feature for its application suite.