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San Francisco, Sept. 22, 2016: Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. and software company Salesforce.com Inc. said Thursday they would jointly develop and market products that use each other’s offerings.
Cisco and Salesforce plan to work together to integrate their platforms focused on customer service and the Internet of Things, a nascent field connecting everyday items, such as lightbulbs, to the Web, to name a few things.
The announcement comes three months after Cisco teamed up with IBM Corp. to deliver new communications functionality for customers.
The new strategic deal between Cisco and Salesforce 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. Together, these solutions will empower companies to quickly and cost-effectively leverage billions of IoT data points to provide personalized, 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.
Customer Service: The two market leaders in customer service are teaming up to deliver a complete customer service 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 is the world’s leading customer service app, providing 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 centers more efficiently.
The collaboration integrations will be available in the second half of 2017, Cisco said in a press statement.