With Dynamics 2016 just over the horizon Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft has chosen to still hold out the olive branch to Salesforce, letting it grow stronger and showing that there is room for more than one CRM product in the market.
While this may not be good news for the Dynamics team it does show that Nadella is being consistent in his approach to partnerships and at placing Office365 at the heart of his strategy. In strengthening the ties between Microsoft and Salesforce Nadela is ensuring that a greater proportion of businesses using the cloud will continue to use Microsoft’s Office suite rather than a competitors.
Microsoft and Salesforce stronger together
While this makes a great headline is there any substance behind it and who has done the heavy lifting in development. Interestingly it appears that both sets of development teams have been working diligently to improve their product integration with each other. The announcement included several new integrations.
Coming in October 2015
General availability for two of the integrations are less than a month away. The Salesforce App for Outlook which works both with Outlook 2013 and Office 365 was first announced back in March. This places Salesforce directly into Outlook, enabling users to use the CRM application without ever leaving their favourite email client.
The second release is Salesforce1 Mobile App for Microsoft Office, announced in July 2015 is enables Salesforce mobile users to access Office documents from within there Salesforce1 mobile app, tying together two cloud SaaS solutions for a greater user experience.
That these two solutions were announced should come as no surprise but what was more important was the pipeline of integrations that were announced alongside them.
(next: Lightning strikes Skype and others)
