'Salesforce Group Edition Featuring Google AdWords?' Who’s Doing Your Branding These Days, the Stanford School of Engineering Syllabus?

It was not the market-defining partnership many expected, but Google and Salesforce.com did announce an alliance yesterday. The first fruit of their collaboration: “Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords,” a joint service through which Salesforce.com will resell Google’s online-advertising tools to businesses.

During a press conference yesterday, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (pictured below) described Salesforce Group Edition Featuring Google AdWords as a complete click-to-sale service, noting that businesses who use it will be able to generate sales leads through AdWords and then track those leads in the Salesforce application. “We have a dream to create millions of AdWords users,” said Benioff.

An interesting partnership, but not the one industry observers had predicted. Certainly, it came as a disappointment to those who’d expected the integration of other Google services like Gmail and Google Spreadsheets into Salesforce.com–although that may come in time. “This is a big product for us,” Benioff said. “We’re very fortunate to have a strong relationship with Google. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Google is my best friend.” At least until it becomes an enemiend, anyway …