The Salesforce-Microsoft Partnership: Paving the Way for Win-Win Business Advantages

Salesforce was founded in early 1999 with a vision to create business applications in a completely different way, delivering software through a model known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Thus began a goal-oriented journey that has been nothing short of impressive and revolutionary — from launching a product to organizing a Dreamforce event, launching AppExchange, introducing various clouds, building Trailhead, and acquiring MuleSoft and Tableau. The list goes on.

In the last two decades, Salesforce has successfully delivered cutting-edge technologies at the speed of light to their customers, either through organic or inorganic innovation by aligning with emerging technologies and industry challenges and dynamic demands. Besides their groundbreaking technical know-how, the Salesforce leadership team also possessed an uncanny foresight—they understood the importance of strategic alliances and acquisitions.

How Salesforce Bolstered its Value Addition with Strategic Acquisitions

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While many industry leaders were hesitant in reaching out and acquiring or aligning with other IT service providers and competitors, Salesforce took a carefully measured leap in this direction. In the last few years, partnerships have been on the rise. One of these much-talked-about partnerships was of Salesforce and Microsoft — two colossal giants in their own domains.

Don't forget to check out: Top 8 Things to Consider While Selecting Salesforce CPQ Consulting Partner

In 2014, Salesforce partnered with Microsoft to deliver a simplified and seamless integration of Microsoft products with Salesforce for higher productivity. Although this has been a highly debated topic, the partnership has been massively successful. In 2019, Salesforce announced it was moving its Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure, and they were integrating Teams with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud for better customer experience.

More recently, in June 2021, Salesforce announced plans for a new set of integration capabilities to make it easier to share data and build applications across the two platforms. This collaboration of the two cloud giants will only provide for more flexible, secure, cost-effective and compliant solutions for customers worldwide.

Let’s take a look at how customers can leverage this partnership to their advantage.

A Case in Point: Using the Salesforce-Microsoft Partnership to Optimal Advantage

Data storage and management are key aspects of any business, but when the quantity of data multiplies, it may start impacting business performance. To improve the overall performance, increasing storage limits within the platform can help boost performance.

One of GS Lab’s customers, an NGO, was facing a similar challenge. Using the Salesforce platform and AppExchange, they were able to manage their donor information and track funds, especially useful as Salesforce imposes certain governance and storage limits to preserve resources for other users. However, as the donor information increased, it began to exhaust its Salesforce storage capacity, thereby hampering the application performance. Although the client could purchase additional storage by increasing the allocated budgets, the governing limits of Salesforce would still impact some functions.

Our customer was looking to analyze and automatically archive essential data from Salesforce in a cost-effective third-party database. Now, Salesforce and Azure integration allows for an automated data archival and retrieval mechanism. Our team developed a custom UI in Salesforce using LWC to enable search and marks record options for archival to Azure cloud after meeting the right criteria. After a successful archival, the Salesforce data was erased and users could still search and view archived records. While we customized Salesforce, we also used Azure platform services like Data Factory (Pipeline) and Azure functions.

The implemented solution not only saved on storage cost but also ensured end-to-end automation for better performance.

Read more about how GS Lab helped our customers reduce costs and streamline their data archival and storage processes:

Here are the leading benefits of data archival and automation, leveraging this partnership:

• Significant reduction in Salesforce object data size and saves on storage spend with a cost-effective solution
• Seamless automation for an end-to-end data archival and retrieval mechanism
• Improved performance with increased application efficiency

Check out an amazing Salesforce video tutorial here: Set Up a Microsoft Exchange Service Account to Sync with Salesforce (Using Command Shell)

Optimizing Salesforce Integrations and Customizations

The ever-increasing need for digital transformation urges organizations to implement Salesforce. However, the functionalities need to be customized to align with data needs, user experiences, and occasionally regulations too. Customizations and integrations are add-on advantages that can help improve efficiency, save costs, and be more user-friendly. All you need is a Salesforce partner who understands custom development using emerging technologies and the Salesforce product-partner ecosystem. With the right blend, the best solution is just within your reach.