Cisco And Salesforce Partnership Links IoT And Cloud CRM

Cisco and Salesforce have joined forces to mix their cloud platforms and Internet of Things (IoT) technology together.

Dubbed a strategic partnership, the two companies combine Cisco’s collaboration, IoT and contact centre platforms with Salesforce Sales Cloud, IoT Cloud and Service Cloud.

“We’re thrilled to announce this strategic alliance with Cisco, which will simplify the customer experience across sales, service and IoT and empower our mutual customers to be far more productive,” said Ryan Aytay, head of strategic product alliances at Salesforce.

IoT and collaboration

The tighter integration of these platforms and services is being touted as a means to help their customers be more productive, as it combines the hardware and software management expertise of Cisco with Salesforce’s customer relationship management offerings.

The overall goal is to enable seamless data transfer between the different platforms rather than requiring manual data migration.

Putting this strategy into action will see Cisco’s Spark and WebEX communications services put into Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, through an integration enabled by the Lightning Framework found in the Salesforce1 cloud platform.

This will allow customers of both companies to communicate using voice, video and chat features without leaving the Salesforce service or making use of plugins, and should bypass the often tedious need to jump between apps when carry out a task.

Things get a little more interesting on the IoT side, with Cisco’s Jasper IoT, a management system for connected devices, being integrated with Salesforce’s IoT Cloud, which ingests IoT data and surfaces insightful information which can be acted upon. Combined the two services allow for data to flow directly from Jasper into the IoT Cloud.

In real-world use this could see a fleet of connected trucks with IoT sensors being managed by Jasper which passes harvested data into the IoT Cloud. A fleet management department or a third-party company could then use the data to create features that trigger maintenance alerts for the fleet’s trucks or for delivery firms allows real-time and automatic delivery updates to be sent out to their customers.

The two companies are also collaboration on the customer services front with the goal of mixing  Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise with the Service Cloud to give customers a package that handles all the contact routing, call treatment, and network-to-desktop computer telephony integration of a call centre with cloud-based customer information and relationship management software.

With the growth of IoT yielding more connected and smart products, such partnerships between companies than can connect IoT devices and those that can handle the data being produced my networks of smart sensors are only likely to increase. As evidenced by SAP’s new cloud and IoT-focused partnership with Bosch.

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