Salesforce.com Inc. and Google announced today an alliance to integrate Google's applications to Salesforce's software for managing sales service, the companies said.

The collaboration aims to provide Salesforce's software customers with applications from Google such as email, calendar, word processor, spreadsheet and other office programs to manage their business through cloud computing or a service hosted online.

The new technology developed by the companies is competitive to Microsoft's software products which are installed and operate from user's computers.

Google and Salesforce.com have always had similar models and philosophies about delivering innovations made possible by the Internet, said Google chief executive Eric Schmidt reported AFP.

Although products from Salesforce.com and Google will reduce the need to store information on their own computer systems, it won't discard their need to keep in-house data centers.

The combination of our leading CRM applications and Google's business productivity applications pushes forward the transformation of the industry to cloud computing, Salesforce founder and Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said according to AFP.

With this joint project Google is in the next stage to compete with Microsoft's Office software and email services which are currently leading the market.

Salesforce is drawing near its rivals on web-delivered software such as NextSuite Inc and Zoho who offer business tools, e mail and a variety of programs.

Microsoft Cloud computing Google Marc Benioff