IBM and Salesforce have strengthened their strategic partnership further by announcing combining IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Quip and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein. The move will help companies connect more effectively with their customers through better insights.
Both the companies had first partnered in March 2017, to bring together some of their software services and AI platforms. In August 2017, IBM and Salesforce unveiled a new set of products including Weather Focus, and Scheduling Assistant.
“The success of our customers drives everything we do at Salesforce, including our strategic partnership with IBM,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. “The combination of IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Einstein and Quip will deliver even more innovation to empower companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way, leveraging the power of the cloud and AI.”
Since both the companies are contributing multiple services to the partnership, below is a summary of how they will use the services, and how will it help them.
1. Core services
IBM will use Salesforce’s customer engagement platform for sales and service, while Salesforce will prefer IBM for cloud services.
“Naming IBM as a Salesforce preferred cloud services provider demonstrates the power of the IBM Cloud to help companies fundamentally change the way they do business,” said Ginni Rometty, chairman, president and CEO, IBM. “This expanded partnership builds on the combined power of Watson and Einstein to help enterprises make smarter business decisions.”
2. Bringing Watson and Quip together
IBM Watson is IBM’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform, while Salesforce Quip is a collaboration platform for enterprise teams.
IBM will bring together the power of Quip with Watson to build new IBM Watson Quip Live Apps, which will help sales teams to better manage their opportunity lifecycle. These custom-built Live Apps will include the document creation and editing platform of Quip, and eliminate the toggling need when there are more than one windows or apps.
3. Combining Watson and Einstein
Salesforce Einstein is an AI integrated CRM platform for enterprises. Both the companies will bring together their respective AI platforms (IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein), to provide AI-driven predictive analysis.
The predictive analysis will enable companies to create personalized interactions with customers on the basis of latest message chat or the call they had, which can help in having strong collaboration with the customers.
Also read: IBM adds new features to Watson to advance AI applications
IBM and Salesforce have more than 4,000 joint customers till date, and have helped a lot of companies, including software corporation Autodesk, to better connect and collaborate with their customers.
Last week, IBM had reported its Q4 2017 and full year results, showing revenue growth from different strategic businesses and cloud, including emerging as a leader in the blockchain space.
The company’s fourth quarter revenue had touched $22.5 billion, out of which $5.5 billion was from the cloud services and the full year revenue was reported to be $79 billion, with $17 billion from the cloud services.
Image source: IBM
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