Cisco and Salesforce are joining forces for a strategic alliance that’s set to enable business users to be more productive than ever before.
The two companies will jointly develop and market solutions that join Cisco’s collaboration, IoT and contact centre platforms with Salesforce Sales Cloud, IoT Cloud and Service Cloud.
In the collaboration space, the two tech giants have agreed to integrate Cisco’s new Spark platform, and market-leading WebEx directly into Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Joint customers of the two companies will now be able to chat via video and audio, natively in Salesforce without the need for plug-ins.
Meanwhile, for IoT fans, Cisco’s recent acquisition Jasper will integrate with the Salesforce IoT Cloud to provide visibility, control and recommended customer actions for connected devices, providing businesses with a more comprehensive and intelligent view of their IoT services.
Cisco Jasper provides real-time visibility into launching, managing and monetizing IoT devices at every stage of their lifecycle. The Salesforce IoT Cloud connects billions of IoT events with Salesforce, unlocking insights from the connected world that empower anyone to take the right action, for the right customer, at the right time.
Combined, the two solutions will empower companies to quickly and cost-effectively leverage billions of IoT data points to provide personalised, engaging experiences for customers, partners and employees. For example, a fleet of connected trucks with IoT devices managed by Cisco Jasper can seamlessly pass data to the Salesforce IoT Cloud. In the Salesforce IoT Cloud, the truck management company can build business logic to provide customers with real-time delivery updates or flag truck maintenance issues that need to be addressed.
The two market leaders in customer service are also teaming up to deliver a complete customer experience solution, from communications infrastructure to an integrated, intelligent agent desktop experience. Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise delivers intelligent contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration and multichannel contact management. The Salesforce Service Cloud provides agents with a 360-degree view of the customer to deliver fast, smart customer service. With these two solutions seamlessly integrating, companies will be able to manage call centres more efficiently.
“Cisco wants to deliver simple, magical experiences. Our goal is for technology to fade into the background so people can get their best work done,” said Rowan Trollope, SVP and GM of IoT and Applications Groups, Cisco. “Cisco and Salesforce coming together to form a strategic alliance can eliminate the friction users experience today so they can become more productive.”
While integrations between Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Salesforce’s Service Cloud are available today through the Salesforce AppExchange, the collaboration and IoT integrations won’t available until the second half of 2017.
“Nothing is more important than making our customers more successful,” said Ryan Aytay, EVP of Strategic Product Alliances, Salesforce. “We’re thrilled to announce this strategic alliance with Cisco, which will simplify the customer experience across sales, service and IoT and empower our mutual customers to be far more productive.”
