First Oracle, then SAP and now, believe it or not – Salesforce!

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The world of the cloud is changing fairly rapidly. I blogged about a week and a half ago about how the Microsoft cloud would be supporting SAP software by the end of June. Well can you believe the pace of change? It was announced a couple of days ago that Salesforce is also to become a global strategic partner.

The product/service details of the partnership are:

  • Salesforce1 for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1. Will enable customers to access Salesforce and run their business from their Windows devices. A preview is planned to be available in fall 2014 with general availability in 2015.

  • Salesforce for Office 365. New interoperability between Salesforce and Office 365 will give customers access to the content they need to collaborate, sell, service and market from virtually anywhere. Plans include the ability to:

  • Access, share, edit and collaborate on Office content from within Salesforce and on Salesforce1 using Office Mobile, Office for iPad and Office 365.

  • Use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online as integrated storage options for Salesforce.

  • Use Salesforce and Outlook together with a new Salesforce App for Outlook.

  • Connect Salesforce data to Excel and Power BI for Office 365 to visualize information and find new insights.

I’ve worked for Microsoft for just over 20 years and I’ve never seen such change or openness happening at these accelerated rates before. Who would have thought, 4 or 5 years ago that Microsoft would host a repository for any customer to share their pre-configured Linux images? Who would have thought Linux VMs in a public Microsoft cloud would be treated neither better nor worse than their Windows cousins? Who would have thought, out of the biggest public cloud providers that Microsoft would have support for more than just .NET? In fact, who would have thought that Microsoft would have support for more languages and platforms than the other providers – Java. Node.js. PHP. Python, Ruby, iOS, Android, PhoneGap, Xamarin, HTML/JS, .NET and of course Windows 8/8.1 and Windows Phone 8/8.1.