Salesforce.com and Google are considering a relationship that could see the firms work more closely together, according to a  report in today’s Wall Street Journal.

The alliance could help the pair compete better with Microsoft, the article argued, although it added that the firms were “still hashing out details of a potential partnership”.

Although details remain very sketchy even the notion of a tie-up was enough to see Salesforce’s shares rise sharply, up almost seven percent.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has long been a supporter of Google, frequently showing off the search giant’s applications as support for his mantra that computing is moving away from reliance on in-house IT infrastructure in favour of a web-based model.

“I know Marc has been a fan of Google, which you would expect given his ‘end of software’ message,” said Craig Sullivan of NetSuite, a company that offers web-based applications.

“It makes sense for any web-based application vendor to work with any other web-based application vendor but our perspective is that this story sounds very similar to what everybody does with Microsoft Office.”

However, a more formal alliance could give Salesforce the support it needs to compete with much larger firms such as SAP and Oracle as it seeks to build a broad on-demand application platform, while threatening the chances of other software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors from overtaking it.