IBM and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership

ARMONK, N.Y. and SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced an expansion of their strategic partnership, bringing together IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Quip and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein to enable companies to connect with their customers and collaborate more effectively with deeper insights.

With this expansion, Salesforce has named IBM a preferred cloud services provider and IBM has named Salesforce its preferred customer engagement platform for sales and service.

"Naming IBM as a Salesforce preferred cloud services provider demonstrates the power of the IBM Cloud to help companies fundamentally change the way they do business," said Ginni Rometty, chairman, president and CEO, IBM. "This expanded partnership builds on the combined power of Watson and Einstein to help enterprises make smarter business decisions."

"The success of our customers drives everything we do at Salesforce, including our strategic partnership with IBM," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. "The combination of IBM Cloud and Watson services with Salesforce Einstein and Quip will deliver even more innovation to empower companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way, leveraging the power of the cloud and AI."

As a part of this extended strategic partnership, IBM will build newIBM WatsonQuip Live Apps, bringing the power of Watson and Quip together. These interactive custom-built applications will be embedded directly into any Quip document to increase the effectiveness of sales teams across the lifecycle of an opportunity. With Quip's document creation and editing platform, customers are able to bring relevant content, for any project, into a centralized document, removing the need to toggle between multiple windows and apps to get work done.

Building on the first IBM and Service Cloud integration, the companies will bring together the power of IBM Watson and Service Cloud Einstein to deliver new AI-driven recommendations for next best actions. Now, with AI driven predictive analytics, companies will be able to create personalized, customer-triggered interactions based on the latest call or messaging chat they had, to help build stronger connections with their customers.

Today's news strengthens the partnership previously announced by IBM and Salesforce to deliver joint solutions that leverage the power of AI and enable companies to make smarter decisions, faster than ever before. With more than 4,000 joint customers, the partnership has already helped companies, such as Autodesk, implement new Watson solutions to connect more deeply with their customers.

"There is a perfect marriage between Salesforce and IBM," said Rachael Cotton, senior manager, machine assisted service engagement, Autodesk. "Salesforce is where many companies like Autodesk house enormous amounts of customer data, most of which goes untapped. Combining the AI power of Watson and IBM Cloud with insights from Salesforce has helped Autodesk better understand its customers and ultimately create a transformed customer experience."

 Additional Information

• Learn more about the new, expanded strategic partnership between IBM and Salesforce here: https://www.salesforce.com/campaign/ibm/
• Learn more about how to surface data from IBM Watson Discovery in Salesforce with Salesforce Trailhead here: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/projects/surface-data-from-ibm-watson-discovery-in-salesforce

Connect with IBM and Salesforce

• Like Salesforce on Facebook at http://facebook.com/salesforce
• Follow @salesforcenews, @salesforce, @IBM, @IBMWatson, @IBMcloud

About IBM Cloud

With $17B in annual cloud revenue, IBM is the global leader in enterprise cloud with a platform designed to meet the evolving needs of business and society. Moving past productivity and cost improvements, the IBM Cloud is tuned for the AI and data demands that are driving true differentiation in today's enterprise. IBM's private, public and hybrid offerings provide the global scale businesses need to support innovation across industries, while its nearly 60 Cloud Data Centers across 19 countries help clients meet their expanding data locality requirements.

For more information on IBM Cloud, visit: ibm.com/cloud

About Salesforce

Salesforce, the global CRM leader, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit:  
http://www.salesforce.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements about potential future offerings and features. The achievement or success of the matters covered by such forward-looking statements involves risks, uncertainties and assumptions. These risks and uncertainties include, among other things, the company's ability to continue to release, gain customer acceptance of and provide support for new and improved versions of the company's services and the company's ability to realize benefits from strategic partnerships. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, the company's results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make. Further information on these and other factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in the reports on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K and in other filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM." For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

• Expected availability and pricing in the second half of 2018.

Media Relations:  
Katie Duffy  
Salesforce  
[email protected]

Faye Abloeser  
IBM  
[email protected]  

SOURCE IBM

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