How The Salesforce And Microsoft Partnership Will Boost Customer Productivity

By Amit Chowdhry ● Nov 17, 2019
  • Salesforce recently announced it is going to use Microsoft Azure as its public cloud provider for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These are the details.

Salesforce recently announced that it is going to use Microsoft Azure as its public cloud provider for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This is an expansion of a strategic partnership to help customers meet the evolving needs of their businesses and boost team productivity. And the new integration between Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds with Microsoft Teams will boost productivity for their customers. The

“At Salesforce, we’re relentlessly focused on driving trust and success for our customers,” said Salesforce co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Keith Block in a statement. “We’re excited to expand our partnership with Microsoft and bring together the leading CRM with Azure and Teams to deliver incredible customer experiences.”

Using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers are empowered to know their customers, personalize marketing using Einstein, engage with them across any channel, and analyze the impact for improving campaign performance. And by bringing the Marketing Cloud workload to Azure, Salesforce is joining the 95% of Fortune 500 companies using Azure infrastructure.

“In a world where every company is becoming a digital company, we want to enable every customer and partner to build experiences on our leading platforms,” added Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “By bringing together the power of Azure and Microsoft Teams with Salesforce, our aim is to help businesses harness the power of Microsoft Cloud to better serve customers.”

As part of the partnership, Salesforce will move its Marketing Cloud to Azure thus unlocking new growth opportunities for customers. Once it is moved to Azure, Salesforce can optimize Marketing Cloud’s performance as customer demand scales. And this will reduce customer onboarding times, enable customers to expand globally more quickly with Azure’s global footprint, and help address local data security, privacy, and compliance requirements.

“Marriott has more than 7,200 properties spanning 134 countries and territories, so driving efficiency and collaboration is critical,” explained Marriott International’s Global Officer of Digital, Distribution, Revenue Strategy, and Global Sales Brian King. “The combination of Salesforce and Microsoft enables our teams to work better together to enhance the guest experience at every touchpoint.”

Customers have been wanting to bring workflows and frequently used apps into their collaboration workspace environments. Many companies actively use both Salesforce’s CRM and Microsoft Teams. So 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 400 brands and teams in 190 countries, we are always looking for ways to scale more efficiently and strengthen collaboration,” commented Unilever’s chief technology advisor Jane Moran. “The powerful combination of Salesforce and Microsoft enables us to be more productive and connect with each other and our customers like never before.”

The new integrations are going to build on existing solutions that enable the mutual customers to be more productive, including the hundreds of thousands of monthly active users tapping into Salesforce’s Microsoft Outlook integration for collaborative purposes.