Microsoft puts arm round Salesforce, pair skip gaily into the cloud

The developments were announced at Salesforce‘s annual Dreamforce conference, where Microsoft’s CEO was reportedly left with Cortana-flavoured egg on his face. Nadella said he wanders around his house with the device on.

The goal of the partnership is to connect the Salesforce Customer Success Platform to Microsoft Office productivity apps and services.

The relationship between Microsoft and Salesforce has blossomed since Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer early previous year. It’s also a part of Microsoft’s history, he said, noted the company’s past connections with SAP and Oracle.

“Customer success is at the heart of everything we do at Salesforce, including our partnership with Microsoft”, said Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce. However, he did note an emphasis on mobile in the future. His Delve graphs show how much time he’s spent using email, talking to customers and taking meetings.

“It’s an aggressive move but it’s worth it”, Benioff told a small group of reporters in an informal press conference after his presentation.

Going back to the productivity focus, Delve, an information discovery and knowledge tool to track your time, also made an appearance.

The inclusion of Power BI was all the more surprising given that this product is a direct competitor of Salesforce’s own Wave Analytics, which is a big theme at this year’s Dreamforce.

When Hempel asked if these industry collaborations has put pressure on the Windows 10 release, Nadella replied it requires Microsoft to be “at its best for building platforms” in order to reach the vast majority of users. Nadella logged in to his Surface Pro 3 with facial recognition, a feature called Windows Hello, and was able to give a quick walkthrough of the Power BI tool and how it can be used to visualize data even with natural language queries. For instance, by applying Cortana’s machine learning capabilities to Salesforce data, the product can assign new leads to the person most likely to convert an opportunity into a sale. Nadella showed off analytics he gets from Delve that show him metrics about his own work life.

While onstage, Nadella demonstrated a number of apps and third-party integrations for mobile and desktop alike Microsoft has unveiled over the last several months, intending to illustrate how the Redmond, Wash.-headquartered corporation has reached out and innovated for business users. Sales Cloud will get sales forecasts using predictive analytics as a result of the integration, too.

The final product that was discussed was the AR project Hololens. Availability is anticipated in the second half of 2016.