IBM and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership

Companies to deliver new solutions to enterprise customers leveraging IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Quip and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein

Salesforce names IBM a preferred cloud services provider

IBM names Salesforce its preferred customer engagement platform for sales and service

ARMONK, N.Y. and SAN FRANCISCO—JAN 19, 2018—IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced an expansion of their strategic partnership, bringing together IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Quip and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein to enable companies to connect with their customers and collaborate more effectively with deeper insights.

With this expansion, Salesforce has named IBM a preferred cloud services provider and IBM has named Salesforce its preferred customer engagement platform for sales and service.

“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.”

“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.”

As a part of this extended strategic partnership, IBM will build new IBM Watson Quip Live Apps, bringing the power of Watson and Quip together. These interactive custom-built applications will be embedded directly into any Quip document to increase the effectiveness of sales teams across the lifecycle of an opportunity. With Quip’s document creation and editing platform, customers are able to bring relevant content, for any project, into a centralized document, removing the need to toggle between multiple windows and apps to get work done.

Building on the first IBM and Service Cloud integration, the companies will bring together the power of IBM Watson and Service Cloud Einstein to deliver new AI-driven recommendations for next best actions. Now, with AI driven predictive analytics, companies will be able to create personalized, customer-triggered interactions based on the latest call or messaging chat they had, to help build stronger connections with their customers.

Today’s news strengthens the partnership previously announced by IBM and Salesforce to deliver joint solutions that leverage the power of AI and enable companies to make smarter decisions, faster than ever before. With more than 4,000 joint customers, the partnership has already helped companies, such as Autodesk, implement new Watson solutions to connect more deeply with their customers.

“There is a perfect marriage between Salesforce and IBM,” said Rachael Cotton, senior manager, machine assisted service engagement, Autodesk. “Salesforce is where many companies like Autodesk house enormous amounts of customer data, most of which goes untapped. Combining the AI power of Watson and IBM Cloud with insights from Salesforce has helped Autodesk better understand its customers and ultimately create a transformed customer experience.”
Additional Information
Learn more about the new, expanded strategic partnership between IBM and Salesforce here: https://www.salesforce.com/campaign/ibm/
Learn more about how to surface data from IBM Watson Discovery in Salesforce with Salesforce Trailhead here: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/projects/surface-data-from-ibm-watson-discovery-in-salesforce
Connect with IBM and Salesforce
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Follow @salesforcenews, @salesforce, @IBM, @IBMWatson, @IBMcloud
About IBM Cloud
With $17B in cloud revenue over the last 12 months, IBM is the global leader in enterprise cloud with a platform designed to meet the evolving needs of business and society. Moving past productivity and cost improvements, the IBM Cloud is tuned for the AI and data demands that are driving true differentiation in today’s enterprise. IBM’s private, public and hybrid offerings provide the global scale businesses need to support innovation across industries, while its nearly 60 Cloud Data Centers across 19 countries help clients meet their expanding data locality requirements.
For more information on IBM Cloud, visit: ibm.com/cloud
About Salesforce
Salesforce, the global CRM leader, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a
whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit:
http://www.salesforce.com.
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