Microsoft and Salesforce caused a minor shock in the tech world yesterday by announcing a wide ranging partnership between the two tech giants. Given their acrimonious history, people were more than a little surprised with the development. In 2010 Microsoft sued Salesforce for patent infringement and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff hit right back, bashing Microsoft’s aggressive attempts to steal his customers and calling the company “monopolists.”
However, things couldn’t have been that bad as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that Microsoft was a customer of Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.
On a call about the announcement for analysts and investors, Nadella said “Microsoft has renewed our commitment to using the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud for one-to-one digital marketing efforts.”
Salesforce clarified that Microsoft is currently using the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder application for B2C marketing of its Office365 product. In turn, Salesforce revealed that it uses Microsoft Azure for development testing.
While the main focus of the deal was the presence of Salesforce’s core CRM apps on Microsoft’s platforms, its interesting to see how it will affect Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud applications, and whether they’ll have a bigger part to play in the future of the partnership.
