Benioff quiet about Google rumor

Anyone who thought Salesforce.com Chairman/CEO Marc Benioff might comment Monday on rumors of an upcoming arrangement between Salesforce.com and Google was disappointed.

Opening up the Salesforce Developer Conference in Santa Clara, Benioff acknowledged there may be curiosity, in light of a Wall Street Journal report that said Salesforce.com and Google were discussing a possible partnership that could integrate Google online services such as email with Salesforce.com CRM tools. This would help the two better compete with Microsoft, the report said.

"Everyone wants to know what's going on with us and Google," Benioff said. He acknowledged he has not been known for withholding comments. "However, in this case I'm sorry, but all we can say is we can't comment at this time on what's happening with us and Google," he said.

Salesforce.com is promoting software development on its hosted, on-demand CRM platform. The company with facilities such as its Apex software is looking for developers to bolster the platform with specialty implementations that blend Salesforce.com software with what users need.

"Everyone has written Salesforce.com exactly for them," Benioff said. "They're not generic apps."

The company also is looking to have customers utilize the Salesforce.com on-demand database instead of a third-party offering such as MySQL. Salesforce.com expects to become a billion-dollar company next year, the first on-demand services company to do so, Benioff said.

Also highlighted at the conference was Adobe Systems's upcoming Apollo technology, allowing online applications to be run offline.

"You get native integration of these Web apps on your desktop computer," said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president for the platform business unit at Adobe. Apollo detects whether a network connection is in use or not, he said.