“Customer success is at the heart of everything we do at Salesforce, including our partnership with Microsoft”, said Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce.
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Salesforce and Microsoft, for example, have had a much closer relationship over the past year – regardless of reports this spring about the Windows maker buying the CRM giant in a rumored multi-billion dollar deal.
Salesforce + Power BI dashboard (shown here) was built by Microsoft in collaboration with Salesforce and Alpine Metrics.
The companies clearly saw the mutual benefit here with Microsoft getting access to the massive Salesforce.com cloud customer base and Salesforce pleasing customers by working more closely with Microsoft tools, which many of its customers are using today.
First up, Skype for Business will integrate into the updated Salesforce Lightning platform.
In addition, Salesforce will integrate with OneNote providing a way to view and edit notes directly from Lightning, as well as use Microsoft Delve to help sales people discover opportunities within Salesforce.
Salesforce is also delivering a Windows 10 app. The idea behind this is to help sales teams operate on the go.
However, all this integration will take time and the firms do not expect to release preview versions of either the Skype or OneNote features in Salesforce until the second half of 2016.
The productivity focus, Nadella said, is a look at how software and services can come together to give users their time back, so they can enjoy both their work and their lives. “It’s incumbent on us, especially for those of us who are platform vendors, to partner broadly to solve real pain points customers have”. With the new Salesforce Lightning integration, users will have some Salesforce content counted among their productivity goals and benchmarks.
A couple of years ago, it would have been unthinkable to see Microsoft’s CEO on stage at a Salesforce conference.
“In a world of big data, recognizing small patterns becomes the most important thing for an organization and an individual”, Nadella said.
Microsoft has been talking up Cortana a lot recently, but its own CEO failed to get it to work properly at one of the most public events to showcase it so far.
Nadella attempted to use the new integration onstage during a demo by opening up the Cortana personal digital assistant on a PC running Windows 10 and stating, “Show me my most at-risk opportunities”.
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Nevertheless, Nadella admitted there are some devices we still don’t fully understand or know what to do with yet, such as virtual or augmented reality. This will also be delivered in the second half of next year.
