Appirio SalesWorks Integrates Salesforce Chatter with Google Apps

SaaS solution provider Appirio says its SalesWorks cross-cloud connector now supports the Salesforce Chatter platform, integrating the social network with the Google Apps platform. The idea, Appirio says, is to inject much-needed information into e-mail and calendaring for sales pros. But how do channel partners potentially fit in? Here’s the story so far.

Appirio SalesWorks itself is designed to integrate with Salesforce.com CRM and other cloud applications, bringing salespeople all kinds of contextual information integrated with their enterprise Google Apps tools. While the focus in on Salesforce integration, Appirio supports extensions to SalesWorks that enable integration with other kinds of customer data from places like Xactly and Workday Financials.

As for the new Salesforce Chatter integration, it’s puts your social feed in a Gmail or Google Calendar sidebar, giving sales professionals a new way to keep in touch, according to Appirio’s press release. It even displays the feeds directly in e-mail messages. And with the Salesforce Force.com application platform behind it, Appirio says, it’s easy to choose who has access to what information across the two.

Interestingly, the press release closes by saying that SalesWorks is “optimized” for integration with Google Apps – which the company also resells. But the implication is that they’re working on broadening the focus of SalesWorks going forward. Our sister site, The VAR Guy, has been wondering about Chatter’s ISV support… Appirio is an example of a developer running with it.

Appirio has three types of channel partners:

We’ll be watching to see how that channel strategy shapes up in 2011.

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