Benioff: The Salesforce, Workday clouds had to integrate
The Salesforce and Workday partnership is an engineering based alliance more than sales and large customers were pushing for more integration.
The Evolution of Enterprise Software
Speaking on an analyst conference call, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Workday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri delivered a spiel that rhymed with the Salesforce-Oracle announcement just a few months ago.
However, Benioff noted that Workday appears to have won out over Oracle in HR software internally. He added that he "recommends Workday HR systems and financial apps to all of our customers."
Salesforce had said that it would adopt Oracle's HR software, but Benioff clarified.
Earlier: As the cloud turns, Salesforce, Workday integrate more | Salesforce, Workday announce strategic product integration
While we do use the Oracle general ledger internally, we have chosen the Workday HCM package as our standard for Salesforce. We have evaluated a variety of packages and we have made the decision to go with Workday.
The partnership with Workday doesn't revolve around sales, said Benioff. For instance, Salesforce isn't compensating its reps for direct sales in Workday. Bhusri, however, added that the Salesforce and Workday reps work well together.
Read this
The two executives said that large customers such as Thomson Reuters were asking for easier integration between Salesforce and Workday. Integration is one of the largest costs in implementing software.
As a result of those integration costs, customers will increasingly go to vendors that have integration partnerships. Benioff said:
We offer phenomenal solutions, but those solutions are better when they were together. And that's what customers want. They want that integration. They want partnership. They want vendors to have working relationships with each other. They want them to take responsibility for implementations and for service level agreements jointly. And that's the kind of relationships that we want. I think increasingly customers will have an aversion to vendors who don't have these types of partnerships and working relationships in place.