Salesforce, Workday strengthen cloud ties
Business-in-the-cloud giants seal total product integration deal
Cloud software heavyweights Salesforce.com and Workday have announced plans to integrate their entire product lines -- a move likely to squeeze enterprise application vendors.
The marriage of applications from the two most powerful born-in-the-cloud enterprise SaaS providers should give partners and their clients a tightly integrated cloud ERP platform to handle the IT fundamentals of most businesses.
"It's a great day for the cloud," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of San Francisco-based Salesforce.com. "[We] both agree that Salesforce.com and Workday need to unite our clouds."
Salesforce.com, a provider of hosted CRM, and Workday, a cloud human resources and finance tools vendor, have already been working together for several years to make their products interoperable and compatible.
The new deal will see increased cross-platform standardisation.
Workday also plans to deliver new connectors to Salesforce for its Workday Human Capital Management, Workday Financial Management and Workday Big Data Analytics.
Salesforce.com, meanwhile, will move Workday's offerings into its applications and platform, including the Salesforce Chatter collaboration suite, according to officials of both companies.
As a result of the expanded partnership:
• Force.com users will now be able to build applications using data directly from Workday's applications.
• Chatter users can receive updates directly from Workday, allowing real-time sharing and collaboration.
• Workday HCM users will be able to use data from Salesforce to improve workforce productivity.
• Workday Financial Management users will be able to use data from Salesforce to improve visibility into financial and operational performance.
"Salesforce.com's CRM integrated with Workday HCM and Financial Management is the best of both worlds," Benioff added.
Aneel Bhusri, chairman and co-CEO of Workday, said: "By deepening our partnership, we continue to make it easy for enterprises around the world to leverage the cloud to transform their businesses."
The popularity of cloud computing in the enterprise has sparked similar deals making collaborators of erstwhile rivals.
In June long-time rivals Microsoft and Oracle announced a partnership to streamline the delivery of Oracle software products to Windows Server Hyper-V and Windows Azure cloud computing users.
Oracle followed that move days later with a comprehensive cloud-focused agreement with Salesforce.com. The nine-year deal with Salesforce will the see the CRM vendor standardise on Oracle's Linux OS, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database and Java Middleware Platform.
Oracle will integrate Salesforce.com with its Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, while Salesforce implements Oracle's Fusion HCM and Financial cloud applications company-wide.
The partnership will ultimately result in the inclusion of Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server in Microsoft's Azure Infrastructure Services as well as the additional ability to obtain and launch Oracle Linux images through Azure.
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