Microsoft and Salesforce have become more at ease with each other in recent years despite being rivals in the cloud CRM space.
At the Dreamforce conference this week, the two companies announced plans to deliver new solutions that integrate Salesforce with Skype for Business, OneNote, Delve and Windows 10 to help businesses connect with their customers and collaborate more effectively.
This includes Skype for Business integration with Salesforce Lightning Experience, Salesforce’s new user interface for its slew of cloud services.
Office 365 users will be able to use Skype for Business to create web meetings, determine if colleagues are online or not, click to chat and make voice and video calls from the Salesforce Lightning Experience. A preview of this, plus a Salesforce1 Mobile App for Windows 10, will be available in the second half of 2016.
Salesforce users who use Microsoft’s OneNote will also be able to link their notes with Salesforce records, as well as view and edit notes directly in OneNote from Salesforce.
In April this year, Bloomberg reported that Salesforce is working with financial advisers to help it field takeover offers after being approached by a potential acquirer.
Both Microsoft and Oracle have been cited as likely suitors – though a Microsoft-Salesforce marriage would make more sense, given the increasingly cozy relationship and tight product integration between the two firms. Such a deal will likely bolster Microsoft’s position in the CRM market.
According to Gartner, Salesforce has been leading the CRM space with a global market share of about 18.4 per cent in 2014. This is followed by SAP (12.1 per cent), Oracle (9.2 per cent) and Microsoft (6.2 per cent).
