Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu published some interesting news about his interactions with salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) CEO Marc Benioff.  It turns out that Salesforce wanted to buy-out Zoho outright.  They made this offer after Zoho accepted an invitation to participated in AppExchange.  Zoho held their ground and refused the acquisition offer due to cultural compatibility.  

After the acquisition talks fell through, Zoho was told to discontinue their CRM software into the AppExchange.  

“I was furious because both Benioff and his team clearly knew we had a CRM offering going into this engagement, and if they had set this as a pre-condition for us to integrate into AppExchange, we would never have put in the resources we did,” stated Vembu.

Salesforce recently announced a partnership with Facebook.

Scott Thompson, President of eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) subsidiary PayPal has joined the Board of Directors for Zuora. Thompson helped build some of the technologies that PayPal uses today.

Zuora is essentially a subscription billing company. Zuora’s flagship product is called Z-Billing. Z-Billing makes it easy to manage customer accounts, product catalog, billing operations, and subscriptions.

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“The Web has quickly become the most powerful tool small and medium sized businesses can use to compete and win in today’s economy,” stated Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google[1]. “Combining the power and simplicity of Salesforce with Google AdWords helps businesses find and keep customers to ultimately drive their continued success.”

Google announced today that the company will be allying with Salesforce.com[2]. Google AdWords would be plugged in to Salesforce.com marketing applications. The application would allow clients to streamline Google AdWords into their marketing plans and new users would receive a $50 AdWords credit.

The first application created with an integrated AdWords platform is Salesforce Group Edition. This application allows AdWord users to have their business advertisements placed along relevant content, gain leads from white paper and Webinar sign ups, and monitor AdWords effectiveness.

Salesforce has about 32,300 customers including Dow Jones and AOL. Salesforce headquarters are in San Francisco.

The official Google press release is available at:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/salesforce_alliance.html[3]

[1] Eric Schmidt bio page
[2] Salesforce.com
[3] Google press release: Salesforce.com and Google Form Strategic Global Alliance