Salesforce.com and Alphabet’s Google are teaming up to help their customers be more productive, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC on Monday.
“You look to Google, you see this incredible world of information, you see the advertising but you also get Google Analytics,” Benioff told CNBC’s Jim Cramer in an exclusive interview on “Mad Money.”
“And Google Analytics coupled with Salesforce’s sales and service and marketing means that both of our customers are going to have customer insights that they’ve never had before. That is really exciting.”
The partnership will combine Salesforce’s customer relations management technology with Google’s G Suite, a series of business-friendly apps designed to stoke collaboration and productivity. The Google product competes primarily against Microsoft Office 365.
Google will also offer a company-wide promotion to give free G Suite licenses for up to one year to all Salesforce customers that are new to G Suite.
The deal will also connect Salesforce with Google Analytics, allowing joint customers to merge sales, marketing and advertising data stored in both systems. The companies said this component will help give their marketing clients a broader view of consumer activity, online and offline.
Today’s news includes an expansion of the existing partnership between the Google Cloud Platform and Salesforce, which also has existing partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Cisco Systems, among other tech titans.
In May 2014, Salesforce announced it would enter a strategic partnership with Microsoft to create a similar linkage between Salesforce’s CRM system and Microsoft Office and Windows.
Soon after, reports emerged of a potential acquisition of Salesforce by Microsoft, but deal talks ended when the companies couldn’t agree on a price.
Since then, the two companies’ relations have fizzled. Tensions rose to a high when Microsoft outbid Salesforce for professional social network LinkedIn in 2015.
In November 2016, Benioff commented on the fallout, saying that “the new Microsoft” under CEO Satya Nadella was much like the “old Microsoft” under Steve Ballmer, who was notoriously averse to corporate partnerships.
Disclosure: Cramer’s charitable trust owns shares of Alphabet.
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Source: Tech CNBC
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announces deeper tie-up with Google