The page – called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Trust Center – echoes an industry trend in which vendors detail how they handle customer data and the steps they take to ensure its protection, and, perhaps most important, its uptime.

Salesforce.com, for instance, offers Trust.Salesforce.com, which gives live and historical data on system performance, news about planned maintenance and information on how the vendor protects customer data. Netsuite has a similar offering with Infrastructure.

Microsoft touted the Trust Center as a window into how it uses and safeguards data.

For instance, Trust Center breaks down data use limits. This particular section shows that while account and address book data may be used for promotions, customer and usage data will not be used for such purposes. It also highlights how business services data is not shared with systems that are used for advertising.

Another section of the Trust Center provides the geographic boundary where a user’s CRM data will be stored; Microsoft doesn’t disclose the exact location of its data centers. Many customers continue to express concern over government access to their data and the U.S. PATRIOT Act.

And it spells out the program’s certification with the Web security benchmark ISO27001 and its adherence to the European Union Data Protection Directive.

Microsoft used the announcement of Trust Center to promote the CRM program’s existent registration with the Cloud Security Alliance’s Security Trust & Assurance Registry Program. Microsoft Office 365 and Windows Azure also have Trust Centers and CSA STAR registrations.

According to a recent Gartner Inc. report, by 2016 more than 50% of Global 1000 companies will store customer-sensitive data in the public cloud. “Transparency in a cloud vendor is key and security should be as big of a concern with online deployments as with on-premises deployments,” Gartner analyst Gene Phifer said in the report.

At least I think it still has a collaboration platform. I haven’t checked on my account in about six months. I think this sums up that project quite nicely.

For years, we’ve been pondering when it would get into the CRM business. When news of the first Salesforce.com-Google partnership broke, speculation was rampant that the search giant would buy the CRM Cloud player. That turned out to be a fairly straightforward partnership with Salesforce.com integrating Google AdWords into its product. Of course, that didn’t stop people from speculating again when Google and Salesforce.com teamed up the next time. Their second alliance simply integrated Google Apps into the Salesforce.com application, it was no merger.

And when Salesforce.com delivered its content management and community building applications, we wondered whether Salesforce.com and Google would wind up as competitors one day.

That day may have come.

Yesterday, the Google Enterprise Blog highlighted the CRM applications available on the Google Apps Marketplace. According to the folks at Google, the top search term for installable apps is CRM. Google now has 13 CRM applications, it separates into three different categories — CRM, Social CRM and Project-based CRM.

Of course, most of Google’s products are a far cry from offering the functionality of the older, more established CRM products like Siebel, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SAP, but it is a beginning. These 13 applications are focused on the SMB market and had the people at Read Write Web wondering When Does CRM Become A Collaboration Service?

Alex Williams writes:

Collaboration tools have value but to tie into the customer relationship cycle will give those services the potential to reach deeper into the enterprise. CRM services increasingly use collaboration services to extend the ways that customers can be brought into the communications process.

 Given Google’s revenues and track record, it bears watching what it will do in the enterprise applications space. It’s starting with CRM and looking very social.