Salesforce and IBM are teaming up on AI (artificial intelligence), announcing a strategic partnership that will see IBM's Watson technology work alongside Salesforce's CRM and Einstein AI platform. Here is the key value proposition from the companies' joint announcement:
The partnership will bring new insights from Watson directly into the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, combining deep customer insights from Salesforce Einstein with Watson's structured and unstructured data across many sources and industries including weather, healthcare, financial services and retail. Together, Watson and Einstein will ingest, reason over and derive recommendations to accelerate decision making and drive greater customer success.
Watson APIs will be integrated with Salesforce and Einstein, giving companies the ability to combine unstructured data from inside or third-party sources along with customer data. Here's one scenario offered by IBM and Salesforce:
For example, by combining local shopping patterns, weather and retail industry data from Watson with customer-specific shopping data and preferences from Salesforce Einstein, a retailer will be able to automatically send highly personalized and localized email campaigns to shoppers.
IBM's Weather Company subsidiary will also deliver a component on Salesforce's AppExchange, which will allow customers to pull forecast data into Salesforce and use it to inform customers.
Also in the works is an IBM application integration suite for Salesforce:
For example, a wealth advisor will be able to unify client data, such as individual investments and risk profiles, with financial trends and public macroeconomic information from Application Integration Suite right within Salesforce to make smarter decisions for her customers.
As with most IBM-related announcements, there's also a professional services component. Last year, IBM bought Bluewolf, then one of the most prominent Salesforce consultancies. Bluewolf has formed a new consulting unit that will focus on Watson-Einstein deployment scenarios.
Finally, IBM is planning to deploy Salesforce's Service Cloud software across the company, according to a statement.
The application integration suite for Salesforce will be available this month, while the rest of the deliverables won't come until the second half of this year.
Salesforce also announced the availability of its Spring '17 release, which features a number of new Einstein services covering sales, service, marketing, commerce, analytics and community-related functions.
In addition, a new tool called Einstein Vision allows Force.com and Heroku developers to add image recognition capabilities to their applications. It provides visual product search; "brand detection" for analyzing user-created images on the web and social media; and product identification to help sales and service workers remotely manage stock and investigate product issues.
Analysis: IBM-Salesforce Partnership Is An Intelligent Arrangement
While some tech industry partnerships can seem more like marketing exercises that are eventually forgotten, Constellation believes there are many good reasons for IBM and Salesforce to come together in this way.
There has been plenty of speculation surrounding Salesforce's strategic plans after it lost out on purchasing LinkedIn to Microsoft last June, but a global partnership with IBM around Watson and Einstein hasn't been a big part of the scuttlebutt.
"At first glance, it makes sense to bring the two sets of capabilities together, but the hint is that this is the beginning of what might build into a deeper set of synergies in the marketplace," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mullholland. "Salesforce and IBM make much of the complementary nature of Watson and Einstein in their focus on different business activities, stating that together it broadens the enterprise approach. So it all looks logical and good on the technology and product side. The test will be how well these two complex companies and cultures learn to work together to step up revenues in the marketplace."
The signs may be good on that front. IBM has prioritized Salesforce deployments in their consulting group, while de-emphasizing SAP resources, says Constellation Research founder and CEO R "Ray" Wang. "They have many joint customers and SFDC is seen as innovative," Wang says. "IBM can help their clients accelerate innovation. It's a win-win."
IBM is going to be able to provide Salesforce with additional AI capabilities and very importantly, a large corpus of data in key areas like financial services and health care, Wang adds. "Salesforce is moving hard to an industry model and this will accelerate their growth."
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