IBM and Salesforce expand their partnership

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, announced an expansion of their strategic partnership, bringing together IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Quip and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein eveloped in Israel 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.

“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.”