What the Microsoft and Salesforce.com Partnership Means for Developers

Yesterday, it was announced that long-time rivals salesforce.com and Microsoft have created a partnership that ultimately brings their products and services together. This has many benefits such as bringing the Salesforce1 Mobile App to the Windows phone, integration with Office 365, an improved Outlook and Salesforce connector and more. But from a developers aspect this would ultimately allow Azure customers to use the Salesforce Platform.

So, what exactly does this mean? I turned to our resident expert and Lead Architect for his thoughts.

“Azure is Microsoft’s true cloud infrastructure (similar to Amazon Web Services) that essentially allows you to pay for CPU time and RAM used while spinning up or down virtual machines as you need them. Currently, Salesforce and Amazon Web Services allow developers to easily create applications that integrate the power of the Salesforce Platform with Amazon Web Services. With the Microsoft and salesforce.com partnership will now basically mean that anything you can do between Salesforce and Amazon Web Services you will now be able to do on Azure.

Heroku, which is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) and part of the salesforce.com family, will also come into play at the integration level to allow for one-click deployment to Azure. Up until now Visual Studio is the only development tool that allows one-click deployment to Azure, but now this partnership will allow salesforce.com to do that too.

One thing that I am optimistic about with this partnership is that it signifies a serious change and more opportunities in the direction for salesforce.com, which as far as I’m concerned would be a good thing.”

Other Features with the Microsoft and Salesforce.com Partnership

• Integration with Excel
• Integration with SharePoint
• Better capabilities with the Salesforce and Outlook Connector
• Integration with Office 365
• The Salesforce1 Mobile app now available on Windows phones

Proving the Skeptics Wrong

In a call earlier today with the press it seemed that many were skeptical about this partnership. But both Marc Benioff and Satya Nadella (salesforce.com CEO and Microsoft CEM respectively) were adamant that
this agreement is for the benefit of bringing value to their customers. Both companies are making investments in the other’s technologies. Salesforce.com will be investing in more SQL Servers while Microsoft will invest in the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud. With large companies, such as SAP, Oracle, salesforce.com and Microsoft, coming together as “friends” and partners clearly indicates that customers will have much more flexibility for their cloud-based solutions. The future looks promising.

In Other Related News, ExactTarget CEO Steps Down

Earlier today it was also announced that ExactTarget CEO and Founder Scott Dorsey is stepping down and leaving the company. I am not sure if this is coincidence or somewhat related to the Microsoft and salesforce.com partnership. But this recent article by TechCrunch states only what was mentioned in a company memo by Scott Dorsey indicating that it was essentially time to move on.