Microsoft and Salesforce have made an announcement in San Francisco at Dreamforce 2015, the latter’s customer extravaganza that the duo will be building upon their earlier initiatives and continue to strengthen ties in the coming future. The companies on Wednesday issued a joint press release that sees a better integration of Salesforce’s CRM platform with Microsoft’s productivity suite of apps.
To recall, the companies announced a strategic partnership in May 2014 to link Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM software with Microsoft’s Office and Windows. This was a rather notable agreement as both companies are fierce competitors in the CRM market, and the blossoming of the relationship between the two can be largely attributed to Nadella replacing Ballmer early last year.
Ballmer had a completely different approach as he was more focused on selling more Microsoft products, at the expense of customers finding it hard to plug in other tools. Nadella has taken an entirely different approach, focusing more on partnerships and compatibility instead of the go-it-alone strategy of his predecessor.
The new partnership includes integrating Skype for Business (formerly known as Lync) with the Lightning platform, which will allow users to make voice/video calls or chat via Skype inside Salesforce. Apart from this, Salesforce will also integrate with OneNote allowing users to edit and view notes directly via Lightning. In addition, it’ll allow the use of Microsoft Delve to help salespeople find more opportunities within Salesforce.
Moreover, Salesforce is also planning to build a Salesforce 1 Mobile app for Windows 10, thus offering a leading mobile cloud tool that could help boost the popularity of the platform.
“Furthering our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, is the motivating force behind our partnership with Salesforce,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft Corp. “As a platform and productivity company, we are focused on bringing together the best of Microsoft Azure, Office and Windows with partners like Salesforce to empower our mutual customers to network, collaborate, communicate and discover information in more effective ways.”
