Microsoft and Salesforce expand strategic partnership to accelerate customer success

Salesforce names Microsoft Azure as its public cloud provider for Salesforce Marketing Cloud to help customers scale and grow; new integration between Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds with Microsoft Teams will boost productivity

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) on Thursday announced plans to expand their strategic partnership to help customers meet the evolving needs of their businesses and boost team productivity. Salesforce has named Microsoft Azure as its public cloud provider for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Salesforce will also build a new integration that connects Salesforce's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud with Microsoft Teams.

"At Salesforce, we're relentlessly focused on driving trust and success for our customers," said Marc Benioff and Keith Block, co-CEOs, Salesforce. "We're excited to expand our partnership with Microsoft and bring together the leading CRM with Azure and Teams to deliver incredible customer experiences."

"In a world where every company is becoming a digital company, we want to enable every customer and partner to build experiences on our leading platforms," said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. "By bringing together the power of Azure and Microsoft Teams with Salesforce, our aim is to help businesses harness the power of the Microsoft Cloud to better serve customers."

Comments on the news

"Marriott has more than 7,200 properties spanning 134 countries and territories, so driving efficiency and collaboration is critical," said Brian King, global officer, Digital, Distribution, Revenue Strategy, and Global Sales, Marriott International. "The combination of Salesforce and Microsoft enables our teams to work better together to enhance the guest experience at every touchpoint."

"With 400 brands and teams in 190 countries, we are always looking for ways to scale more efficiently and strengthen collaboration," said Jane Moran, chief technology advisor, Unilever. "The powerful combination of Salesforce and Microsoft enables us to be more productive and connect with each other and our customers like never before."

Salesforce names Microsoft Azure as its public cloud provider for marketing cloud

With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers are empowered to know their customers, personalize marketing with Einstein, engage with them across any channel, and analyze the impact to improve campaign performance. Bringing its Marketing Cloud workload to Azure, Salesforce joins the over 95% of Fortune 500 companies benefitting from an Azure infrastructure offering the most global regions of any cloud provider.

Through this partnership, Salesforce will move its Marketing Cloud to Azure — unlocking new growth opportunities for customers. By moving to Azure, Salesforce will be able to optimize Marketing Cloud's performance as customer demand scales. This will reduce customer onboarding times and enable customers to expand globally more quickly with Azure's global footprint and help address local data security, privacy and compliance requirements.

Salesforce and Microsoft Teams integration will boost productivity

As teamwork becomes a driving force in the workplace, people want to bring workflows and frequently used apps into their collaboration workspace environments. 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.

Building on a commitment to customer success