Google’s no wimp, but it never hurts to have help when doing battle with a company like Microsoft.  A rumored partnership with Salesforce.com would provide just that, although the financial details (or even any information about the resulting products) are still unknown.

Salesforce launched an incubator for startups.  It is a similar proposition to the Socialtext Coworking space, but has a cost for the startup and is structured as a partnership program.  A BusinessWeek article interviewed me about it.

In a world of more focused or niche based web services such as Harvest, integrations are going to continue to be key (as I’ve noted in the past).

Salesforce.com announced new customization features of Winter ’07, including full componentization of its analytical dashboards aimed at allowing users to create, share, and combine new components that analyze and present data from Salesforce.

Salesforce, the one-stop business software shop, pulled the wraps off yesterday on a Google AdWords management service.

The online CRM software company picked up a three-person software company whose expertise in tracking sales leads arriving from Google advertising will become part of the Salesforce software.

All that CRM momentum Microsoft has been touting for the forthcoming software-as-a-service CRM Live elicited a chuckle and a “Microsoft is being out hustled by everyone” comment from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

The first of several on-demand applications available from JotSpot through Salesforce’s AppExchange will transform Excel spreadsheets into browser-accessible versions.

Salesforce.com recently added Arlington Economic Development (AED), a department of Arlington County Government (VA), to its customer base. The branch of county government dedicated to economic enhancements is using customer relationship management (CRM) platform AppExchange to track over a $1 billion in real estate and business development projects.

The CRM company wants to extend its applications to mobile platforms, and the Sendia acquisition will help with Salesforce’s launch of AppExchange Mobile.

This is why I said “give Six Apart a break” a few days ago. Turns out that Salesforce.com had an outage the other day too.

A couple of months ago, Oracle added Siebel to the fold and in the process began their squeeze of rivals like Saleforce.com. At this point, Oracle said they have no plans to buy Salesforce. Instead Oracle plans to rub out the CRM.

SalesForce stock jumped $1 a share today after an SG Cowen analyst commented that he expects the company’s shares to beat the rest of the market by 40% over the next year.