Salesforce, Workday announce strategic product integration
Business software giant Salesforce.com and cloud applications firm Workday announced on Wednesday the forging of a strategic alliance that will see both firms integrate their products with one another.
The deal will see Salesforce standardize on Workday's applications and vice versa. In practical terms, Salesforce will use Workday as part of its applications and platform, while allowing Workday customers to use Salesforce Chatter for enterprise collaboration.
Also, according to the companies, Workday will build new Salesforce connectors for its financial management and big data analytics products. In doing so, Force.com users will then be able to build applications from data stored in Workday's applications. Meanwhile, Chatter users will receive updates directly from Workday, increasing collaboration hooks and data sharing.
Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff hailed it as a "great day for the cloud," describing the need for both firms to "unite our clouds."
In added prepared remarks, Workday co-chief executive Aneel Bhusri said his firm had enjoyed a "long-standing relationship" with Salesforce and the integration of each other's products is, "another exciting step forward driven by our mutual customers."
"By deepening our partnership, we continue to make it easy for enterprises around the world to leverage the cloud to transform their businesses with the proven combination of salesforce.com and Workday," Bhusri added.
It comes just a few months after chief executives from Oracle and Salesforce announced a new cloud deal, setting aside their differences after years of bickering. The nine-year agreement will also see a level of data sharing and product integration between the two cloud giants.
The deal was a shocker at the time, considering the long war of words between the two company leaders. In spite of this, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said the move will help enterprise customers to "expect application integrations to work right out of the box."