Stranger things have happened! Playing the multicloud game by the book, Salesforce has chosen Microsoft Azure as the public cloud provider for its Marketing Cloud.
This, right at the time when the company’s mega contract with AWS is up for renewal.
At the end of the day, this move is another big win for the Redmond based technology giant that will see the two companies integrate Sales Cloud and Service Cloud with productivity and collaboration services that Microsoft is known for — most notably the highly resurgent Microsoft Teams.
Details of this new partnership are pretty thin right now, but we do know that Salesforce plans to leverage certain Azure services and infrastructure, as well as Teams for its customers.
The effort to connect Teams will get underway late next year, though:
“Sales and customer service are highly collaborative, team-centric functions, and many companies actively use both Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Teams. As part of this agreement, Salesforce will build a new integration that give sales and service users the ability to search, view, and share Salesforce records directly within Teams. The new Teams integration for Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds will be made available in late 2020.”
With this, Salesforce now has its CRM operations hosted across four different IaaS providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Alibaba, and now Azure. As experts note, this not only helps the company speed up its geographic expansion, but also meet customer expectations.
Microsoft and Salesforce still compete in the customer relationship management space.
Yet at the same time, while both CRM giants have often been at odds with one another — as during the case of the LinkedIn takeover — the two have also forged a solid relationship together centered around their software and services.
Ultimately, this says a lot about Microsoft’s approach to business today, and how the company is willing to partner broadly to achieve its goals. No longer is Microsoft afraid of strengthening Salesforce at the potential expense of Dynamics 365, its own CRM tool.
Good going.
