Salesforce names Microsoft Azure as public cloud provider for Marketing Cloud

Microsoft and Salesforce have announced plans to expand their strategic partnership through the migration of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure. The move is anticipated to allow Salesforce to optimize Marketing Cloud performance to meet increasing customer demands.

In order to support their joint customers using Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Teams, Salesforce will also build new integrations for its Sales and Service clouds with Teams. The integrations will allow sales and service users to access Salesforce records directly in Teams, and is expected to go live in late 2020.

Why we should care

Moving Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Azure will allow the company’s customers to benefit from Azure’s infrastructure which will help brands manage data security, privacy and compliance requirements on a global scale.

The integration between the widely-used Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Teams can be expected to drive further collaboration across sales and service teams by increasing accessibility to data directly within the Teams app. Salesforce and Microsoft customers – like Marriott International – will be able to take advantage of improved collaboration and greater efficiency through the strategic partnership.

“Marriott has more than 7,200 properties spanning 134 countries and territories, so driving efficiency and collaboration is critical,” said Brian King, global officer, digital, distribution, revenue strategy and global sales, Marriott International. “The combination of Salesforce and Microsoft enables our teams to work better together to enhance the guest experience at every touchpoint.”

More on the news

• By bringing its Marketing Cloud to Azure, Salesforce joins over 95% of Fortune 500 companies using the Azure infrastructure, which covers the most global regions of any cloud provider.
• “In a world where every company is becoming a digital company, we want to enable every customer and partner to build experiences on our leading platform,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “By bringing together the power of Azure and Microsoft Teams with Salesforce, our aim is to help businesses harness the power of Microsoft Cloud to better serve customers.”

About The Author

Jennifer Cannon

Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media's Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.