While Salesforce and Workday have collaborated in various ways over the past 20 years, their new partnership centered on sharing datasets and AI technologies goes far beyond anything they’ve worked on before and is a clear attempt to alter the competitive dynamics in enterprise software.
I shared my initial thoughts on this partnership last week in a piece called “Salesforce and Workday Target SAP, Oracle with New Data, AI Partnership.” My thesis was that while Salesforce and Workday are each leaders in their respective segments — CRM for Salesforce and HCM for Workday — neither could match the data-gathering capabilities of SAP and Oracle, whose end-to-end application portfolios allow them to collect and analyze all of an enterprise’s data.
So I was intrigued to watch a YouTube video featuring Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach discussing the strategy behind this ambitious new partnership on a recent episode of Jim Cramer’s Mad Money show on CNBC.
In the discussion, both Benioff and Eschenbach made it very clear that while the companies made a half-hearted attempt to cloak the significance of their new alliance behind the introduction of a new employee-service agent, the true strategic intent is to enable customers to seamlessly deploy Salesforce data and Workday data to approach end-to-end coverage for AI initiatives.
And while neither Benioff nor Eschenbach mentioned SAP or Oracle, it would be naive to think that those arch-rivals of both Salesforce and Workday were not vital factors in this new alliance.
Tracing the long-running collaborations between the two software-as-a-service (SaaS) pioneers, Eschenbach said, “I called Marc five months ago and said, ‘We have the three most powerful datasets and systems of record in the enterprise between your CRM and our financials and HR.
“We need to come together, because no two companies have that level of datasets for the enterprise other than Workday and Salesforce. And that’s the exciting part — plus, it’s all automated!”
Calling the new alliance “a revolutionary partnership that will change the dynamic of how people leverage AI going forward,” Eschenbach described how he and Benioff expect that customers will benefit from not just the federated datasets but also simpler workflows.
“I think what’s most important, Jim, is that between the two of us, we have the three most-important datasets in the enterprise: the employee data, the customer data, and the financial data. And our objective with this partnership is to meet our customers’ employees in their flow of work,” Eschenbach said.
“Whether you’re in Slack, whether you’re in Workday, or whether you’re in Salesforce, you can actually stay in those platforms and get access to each of the datasets that we have, and you no longer have to jump out of either Salesforce or Workday.”
Eschenbach later offered a few examples.
“You can do precise workforce planning, taking a look at all the skills that you have in your workforce and matching it against the demand that you have from your Salesforce data. Think about doing continuous financial planning: leveraging Workday’s financial planning platform, looking at the forecast you have in Salesforce, and pulling those two datasets together and determining whether or not you’re on track to meet your financial goals or objectives,” Eschenbach said.
“And if you’re a sales rep and you’re in Salesforce and you’re working on a very complex deal, the system now will provide you prompts on what to do next to help close or accelerate that opportunity.”
Benioff was equally enthusiastic and spoke of the new partnership as a catalyst that will push AI capabilities to new levels.
“With this incredible new expanded dataset, there’s a whole new range of applications and capabilities that we could have never imagined — plus, we’re layering Slack on top of all of that,” Benioff said.
“So this is really a next step for AI: the ability to kind of bring more and more data together.”
Benioff also tapped into a term and theme that his friend Larry Ellison has been using for several years: autonomous technology.
“So all these incredible things that you can do with Workday and Salesforce you will be able to do autonomously,” Benioff said.
“The power of what’s happening right now in our industry, and what we’re really referring to is this: it’s really humans with AI that are driving customer success together, and humans with AI that are driving employee success together,” Benioff said.
“But now there’s this idea of autonomous — wow, this idea that we have agents that are acting on our behalf, you’re seeing the expansion of our human sales forces and our human service forces, and really our employee bases extended through artificial intelligence and agents. That’s the idea that we’re able to kind of open up a new sales territory with a sales agent, or do service deflection with a service agent, or an example now, with this federated data set, the ability for employees to get the access to the information they need through using this agent technology.
“This is humans with AI driving success together.”
Final Thought
I congratulate Eschenbach and Benioff for conceiving this compelling new vision and driving it forward, and share their optimism about its potential for the customers of both companies.
I think it also underscores, however, the approaches that SAP and Oracle have been taking for a number of years in their attempts to offer end-to-end solutions that provide customers with unified data models and the opportunities to harmonize and optimize operations across large and complex enterprises.
The comments from both Eschenbach and Benioff indicate that they are hoping to be able to close the gap on — and perhaps even leapfrog — SAP and Oracle with new approaches to AI solutions, new types of AI-powered agents, and a striking new level of vendor-to-vendor collaboration.
And if I had to guess who the big winners will be in this new front in the Cloud Wars? That’s easy; the big winners will be the customers, who now have more options and more innovation at their disposal here at the dawn of an entirely new way of doing business.
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