IBM and Salesforce have announced an expansion of their strategic partnership and agreed on bringing together IBM Cloud and IBM 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.
As a part of this extended strategic partnership, IBM will build new IBM WatsonQuip 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 would be 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 Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein to deliver new AI-driven recommendations for next best actions. Now, with AI-driven predictive analytics, companies would 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.
Availability and pricing of these joint solutions are expected for publication in the second half of 2018.
Preferred Cloud Services Provider
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 of IBM.” This expanded partnership builds on the combined power of IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein to help enterprises make smarter business decisions.”
The announcement would strengthen 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. 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.
“The success of our customers drives everything we do at Salesforce, including our strategic partnership with IBM,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. “The combination of IBM Cloud and IBM 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.”
