Microsoft and Salesforce, two of the world’s leading providers of business software and services, have announced a new partnership to help organizations drive more revenue and engagement from their customer relationships. The coalition, named “Microsoft-Salesforce Alliance for Customer Success” or MSACS, aims to combine the strengths of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, and Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Salesforce Customer 360, to provide a more comprehensive and integrated solution for sales, marketing, and service operations.
According to the joint press release, the MSACS alliance will enable customers to “unleash the power of their data” by seamlessly connecting their Salesforce and Azure systems, leveraging AI and analytics tools, and automating workflows across different departments and devices. The partners claim that the MSACS solution will offer benefits such as:
- Faster time-to-market: With pre-built connectors and templates, customers can integrate their Salesforce and Azure environments faster and with less customization allmeaninginhindi.
- Scalability and flexibility: Customers can leverage the global reach and infrastructure of Azure to support their growing or fluctuating demands for computing power and storage.
- Enhanced insights and personalization: Customers can use Azure’s AI and data processing capabilities to analyze and visualize their data from Salesforce, and apply predictive models and personalized recommendations to their marketing and sales campaigns.
- Better collaboration and productivity: Customers can use Microsoft Teams and Office 365 to streamline their communication and collaboration within and across teams, and to access their CRM data and workflows from any latestforyouth device.
- Secure and compliant operations: Customers can leverage the security and compliance features of Azure to protect their data and comply with industry regulations and standards.
The MSACS coalition builds on the existing partnership between Microsoft and Salesforce, which dates back to 2014, when Salesforce adopted Azure as its preferred cloud provider. Since then, the two companies have worked together on several initiatives to integrate their products and services, such as biographycon:
- Salesforce AppExchange on Azure: In 2016, Salesforce announced that it would run its AppExchange marketplace, which features over 4,000 enterprise apps, on Azure, enabling customers to discover and install these apps more easily and securely.
- Salesforce connectors for Power BI and Excel: In 2018, Microsoft released two connectors for Salesforce in its business intelligence and data visualization tools, Power BI and Excel, enabling users to access, query, and analyze their Salesforce data directly from these applications.
- Dynamics 365 integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud: In 2020, Microsoft announced that its Dynamics 365 CRM platform would integrate with Salesforce Sales Cloud, enabling customers to sync their customer data, leads, and opportunities between the two systems.
The MSACS coalition represents a deeper and broader collaboration between the two companies, as it aims to provide a holistic and end-to-end solution for customer success, rather than a set of point-to-point integrations. By combining the strengths of Azure and Salesforce, the partners hope to differentiate themselves from other CRM and cloud providers, such as SAP, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud, and to capture a larger share of the fast-growing market for digital transformation and customer experience solutions wikibirthdays.
According to research firm IDC, the worldwide spending on digital transformation technologies, which include cloud, AI, and CRM, is expected to reach $7.4 trillion by 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 17.5%. The CRM market, which accounts for a significant portion of this spending, is also expected to grow at a healthy pace, driven by the increasing demand for personalized and omnichannel customer experiences, as well as the need for better data management and analytics. The COVID-19 pandemic has also accelerated the shift towards digital and remote business models, making the adoption of CRM and cloud solutions fleepbleep.
