Microsoft and Salesforce on Thursday announced that their upcoming flagship products will be integrated in a “global, strategic partnership,” by bringing Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) apps to Windows, Windows Phone, and Office 365.
The two longtime tech industry rivals, who have traded lawsuits over the years, have decide to bury the hatchet and team up to deliver Salesforce1 for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1, with a preview slated for fall 2014 and general availability expected next year.
“Working together we’ll deliver new solutions that connect the customer insights of Salesforce to the cloud productivity of Office 365, the cloud platform of Azure and the mobility of Windows, so our customers can do more,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in the statement.
“Today is about putting the customer first,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO at Salesforce. “Together with Microsoft, we are building bridges that allow customers to be more productive.”
This move follows the partnership of Microsoft and SAP, a few weeks ago, promising to bring a number of SAP’s core business apps will be certified to Azure by June.
Microsoft and Salesforce have also announced the roll out of Salesforce for Office 365, without any specific timeline. With this, customers will be able to access, share, edit and collaborate on Office documents from within Salesforce and on Salesforce1 using Office Mobile, Office for iPad and Office 365.
Salesforce for Office 365 also will allow customers use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online as integreated storage options for Salesforce. There will also be a new app to use Salesforce and Outlook together, and connect Salesforce data to Excel and Power BI for Office 365 to visualize and analyze information.
