From yesterday’s announcement:
Salesforce will support Windows, Windows 8.1, build “interoperability Salesforce and Office 365,” Microsoft’s subscription-based productivity suite, and integrate OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and Outlook in various capacities. Salesforce will use Microsoft’s Azure broadly.
Who would have ever thought there would be a picture containing both a Microsoft CEO and Mark Benioff (Salesforce.com CEO)? Though they are in the same picture they are not hugging. Interesting bedfellows to say the least! Most of these decisions come down to money. A better way for Microsoft to make money and for their customers to take advantage of their investment.
As many of you know, Salesforce.com was started by Oracle executives, Oracle executives/former executives continue to be large investors and the system backbone is written on top of the Oracle database engine. So though there is a partnership there won’t be any ownership happening anytime soon (for those in the M&S conspiracy business). Salesforce.com by the way also has a very strong partnership with Google as well (which has a competing solution to Microsoft Office 365).
In the announcement article on CRN, Jeff Davis, CEO of Perficient, is quoted. You can read the full article here. As you may or may not know, Perficient is both in the Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM business. Though these are direct and major competitors it is just a part of the all up solution for our customers – and it’s important that our customers have options.
Salesforce was looking for a platform and Microsoft is a platform and software company. For our non-Dynamics CRM customers that are currently utilizing or looking to utilize Office 365, SharePoint, OneDrive and more, this will be a nice opportunity for better communication between the system and Saleforce.com. It will allow (at some level) for Salesforce.com users to have better access to their documents and related tools to be able to be more productive in their jobs. This will be better than today where there is limited to no interoperability but is in no way as good as a native Microsoft technology like Dynamics CRM.
So what does this mean for our Dynamics CRM customers? This means Microsoft will have to continue to strongly invest in the future of this technology to make it stronger, faster, smarter than it has ever been before. It will help enable our customers to be more productive and efficient with the tool in order to increase revenue for their organizations. It will mean that more extraordinary things are coming and soon from the Dynamics team at Microsoft because that is what we expect and that is what our customer’s continue to demand. It is an exciting time to be part of this space for both us and our customers.
This partnership fits well with Microsoft’s continued cloud first and mobile first strategy. Azure is continuing to gain momentum as the cloud choice for major software vendors like Oracle and Salesforce.com. Microsoft will continue to compete head to head against Salesforce.com as they always have. It will force Microsoft to continue to be very good with the innovation. It also validates the “One Microsoft” strategy.
There is an awesome and amazing line-up of things to come from Microsoft for Dynamics CRM. With the CRM 2013 release and now the spring release of Dynamics CRM, Dynamics CRM is a valuable offer and at an incredible price point.
As they said in The Godfather Part II, “…keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
