Google Tuesdays | Google and Salesforce, It’s Official (and a Marc Benioff Video)

It’s being called “one of the worst kept secrets in Silicon Valley,” and it’s now official.

Early speculation thought the deal was going to be aimed at the enterprise. However, the announcement here today is aimed squarely at the small and medium-sized business (SMB) (define) markets.

Under the deal, Salesforce (Quote) will replace Salesforce Team Edition with Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google Adwords. Google’s Adwords technology will come with Salesforce Group Edition and allow for integration of Adwords into the application, as well as let Salesforce customers get sponsored placement within Google.

This will allow all 32,000 of Salesforce’s customers to distribute their online ads through Google (Quote). In turn they will have Google Analytics to look at what keywords are working best at bringing in customers and they will be able to refine their placements.

…”We want every Salesforce user to be an Adwords advertiser,” Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s founder and CEO said on stage during the event here. “We want to make millions of Adwords customers.”

The video below isn’t related to the news story, which you can continue to follow through Google News. It’s the the Salesforce CEO talking about Google Apps for about 2 minutes, and a bit about Salesforce. This is from back in February, and it’s interesting to see him discussing the parallels between the two.