News
        
        Microsoft, Salesforce Ink Deal Around Azure Cloud and Teams
        
        
        
			- By Kurt Mackie
- November 15, 2019
As part of a newly inked partnership, CRM service provider Salesforce  will leverage certain Microsoft Azure services, as well as Microsoft Teams,  for services to customers.
Per the agreement announced Thursday, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud  service will use  Azure infrastructure. In addition, Salesforce is  planning to build connectors that will link the  Teams chat and  collaboration service with both the Salesforce Sales Cloud and the Salesforce Service  Cloud. 
The latter effort to connect with  Teams will  happen late next year. It's being done, in part, to better serve Salesforce's  Sales and Service customers, who may also be using  Teams, per the  announcement:
  Sales and customer service are highly collaborative, team-centric  functions, and many companies actively use both Salesforce CRM and Microsoft  Teams. As part of this agreement, 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.
Similarly, Salesforce's moving of its Marketing Cloud to  Azure infrastructure is deemed as "unlocking new growth opportunities for  customers," including the ability to scale operations globally and meet  data compliance requirements.
Salesforce now has its CRM operations hosted across four  cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google  Cloud, Alibaba Cloud (in China) and now  Azure, noted Olive Huang, a  research director at Gartner Research Inc. She offered four reasons why in this  Gartner blog post. 
First, Salesforce needs to speed up its geographic  expansion. Next, Salesforce is meeting customer expectations to use application  processes that are associated with various cloud services. Salesforce also is  actively boosting its internal cross-platform cloud technical expertise with  its cloud services partnerships. Lastly, Huang said that there's a bigger  picture to the partnerships, and that "the relationship extends to other  product groups such productivity suites, analytics, AI, as well as joint  go-to-market efforts."
Microsoft and Salesforce still compete in the CRM space,  but they've announced various collaborative efforts over the years. Salesforce  built a Lightning  connector to Outlook about three years ago. The two companies announced an  integration of Salesforce's  CRM with Office 365 applications about five years ago.
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
            
        
        
                
                    About the Author
                    
                
                    
                    Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.