Cisco and Salesforce have a longstanding partnership that just got quite a bit deeper. Here are the key details from their joint announcement:
The two companies will jointly develop and market solutions that join Cisco’s collaboration, IoT and contact center platforms with Salesforce Sales Cloud, IoT Cloud and Service Cloud.
New integrations will include:
Collaboration: Cisco and Salesforce will natively integrate Cisco Spark and WebEx into Sales Cloud and Service Cloud via the Salesforce Lightning Framework. With this integration, joint customers will be able to communicate in real-time using chat, video, and voice without leaving Salesforce or having to install a plug-in, eliminating the hassle of toggling between apps.
IoT services: Cisco Jasper and the Salesforce IoT Cloud will integrate 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.
The companies will also integrate Salesforce's Service Cloud and Cisco's contact center platform, although that relationship dates back to 2009, making this an update rather than a new endeavor.
Meanwhile, the IoT and Spark integrations are slated for availability in the second half of next year, a time frame suggesting the engineering work to complete them remains in the early stages.
"Thisis a move that will be welcomed by the customers of both Cisco and Salesforce confirming their strategic investments in both companies' products and services were good moves," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "Both companies excel at partnerships that allow their well-focused core activities to provide even greater value through deep integration with other partners' technology."
Meanwhile, "the delivery date in 2017 illustrates both the complexity of the integration this move requires and the level of increase in functionality we can expect to see delivered," Mulholland adds. "This is a true strategic move taking the product level integration and resulting functionality provided beyond adhoc integrations by third parties. A possible side benefit is the reduce in security risks inherent in ad hoc integrations together with improved management across the activity chain."
Indeed, the partnership on the whole looks mutually beneficial with Spark's comprehensive communication capabilities giving Salesforce something it has lacked, as Constellation VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky pointed out here. In turn, Jasper provides Salesforce IoT Cloud with another means for device connectivity. (Salesforce had already partnered with Thingworx, Xively and others on this front.)
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