Cisco and Salesforce have struck a strategic alliance in order to jointly develop and market solutions.
The plan is to help businesses to become more productive and to do this the two companies will develop solutions that join Cisco’s collaboration, IoT and contact centre platforms with the Salesforce Sales Cloud, IoT Cloud and Service Cloud.
As part of the work there will be native integration of Cisco Spark and WebEx into Sales Cloud and Service Cloud via the Salesforce Lightning Framework. The idea behind this is to help joint customers to communicate in real-time using chat, video, and voice without leaving Salesforce or installing a plug-in.
On the Internet of Things front the two will work together to integrate Cisco Jasper and the Salesforce IoT Cloud. The companies say that this will bring more visibility, control and recommended customer actions for connected devices.
In essence, the idea is to provide a more intelligent view of by combining the real-time visibility capabilities of Jasper and the ability of the IoT Cloud to help unlock insights from billions of IoT events.
The companies say that the combined power of the solutions will help companies to cost-effectively use billions of IoT data points to provide personalised and more engaging experiences for customers.
Rowan Trollope, SVP and GM of IoT and Applications Groups, Cisco, said: “Cisco wants to deliver simple, magical experiences. Our goal is for technology to fade into the background so people can get their best work done.
“Cisco and Salesforce coming together to form a strategic alliance can eliminate the friction users experience today so they can become more productive.”
Another area that the companies will be working together is in the field of customer service. Cisco’s Unified Contact Centre Enterprise will integrate with the Salesforce Service Cloud to help companies to manage call centres more efficiently.
Ryan Aytay, EVP of Strategic Product Alliances, Salesforce, said: “Nothing is more important than making our customers more successful.
“We’re thrilled to announce this strategic alliance with Cisco, which will simplify the customer experience across sales, service and IoT and empower our mutual customers to be far more productive.”
The collaboration integrations are expected to be available in the second half of 2017 and customers will need a Salesforce license and a Cisco Spark and/or WebEx license. The IoT integrations are also expected in the second half of 2017, while the Unified Contact Centre Enterprise and Salesforce Service Cloud integration is available immediately through the Salesforce App Exchange.
