After years of fighting in the market for cloud services and CRM solutions dedicated to companies, Microsoft and Salesforce.com joined forces by announcing the signing of a comprehensive strategic partnership for mutual integration of their flagship solutions.
The agreement provides that the Salesforce CRM solution is integrated with the Windows OS, the Azure cloud platform and the office suite Office 365. Microsoft and Salesforce have signed a strategic partnership to create new solutions that will enable you to connect the platform and the CRM app to Windows and Office. Users will then have new tools to improve their productivity. The partnership, however, raises questions about the future of Microsoft’s own CRM Dynamics solution that competes with Salesforce.
Customers of both companies will be able to access the Salesforce1 platform through the Windows and Windows Phone 8.1 devices. The first versions of the app for the two Microsoft operating systems will deploy in the fall. General availability is scheduled for 2015.
The agreement also provides for the release of Salesforce for Office 365. Interoperability between the two cloud services allow customers to edit, share, and collaborate with the contents of Office by using Office Mobile, Office for iPad and Office 365. Salesforce Users can also take advantage of the storage options offered by OneDrive and SharePoint Online.
To improve the integration between Salesforce and Outlook, Microsoft will be issued a new version of the app Salesforce for Outlook. Finally, the data in Salesforce can be imported into Excel and PowerPoint used by BI to Office 365. The cloud productivity suite will be the main point of contact between the two platforms.
The co-operation will empower people to use Office 365 and Salesforce seamlessly together, whether it’s sharing Office documents in Salesforce1 or analyzing CRM data in Power BI for Office 365. Second, both the company are bringing the leading CRM application to Windows devices, both phones and PCs.
This partnership is the mark of Microsoft revival since the arrival of Satya Nadella, CEO since February. With this partnership, Satya Nadella therefore continues with its strategy “Cloud First Mobile First”. In 2010, the two companies had ended up in court for a mutual patent infringement, settled out of court two years later. In 2012, the CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff stated that Windows 8 would be the last operating system from Microsoft, as many companies will use cloud-based solutions.
Last week, Microsoft and SAP made an agreement to increase their collaboration in the areas of cloud, data, and mobility. It is expected by the end of the second quarter of 2014, the SAP Business Suite software, SAP Business All-in-One solutions, the SAP Mobile Platform, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (SAP ASE) and the Developer Edition support the SAP HANA platform will run on Microsoft Azure.
