Good afternoon. My name is Christie and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Microsoft and Salesforce.com Partnership Briefing Conference Call. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to our host, John Cummings, Senior Director of Investor Relations for salesforce.com.
Sir, you may begin your conference.
Thanks, Christy, and good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for a briefing on the Microsoft Salesforce partnership announced a short while ago. On the call today is Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella and Sales .com Chairman and CEO, Mark Benioff. Satya and Mark will open the call with a few brief remarks and then we'll open the call for your questions. During today's call, we may also reference certain unreleased services or features not yet available. We cannot guarantee the future timing or availability of these services or features and recommend that customers listening today make their purchase decisions based on services and features currently available.
In addition, it's possible that some of our comments today may contain forward looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. And should any of these risks or uncertainties materialize or should our assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual results could differ materially from these forward looking statements. And a description of risks, uncertainties and assumptions and other risk factors that could affect our respective company's financial results are included in each of our SEC filings included in our most recent reports on Forms 10 Q for Microsoft and 10 ks for sales force.com under the heading Risk Factors. So with that, let me turn the call over to you, Mark.
Well, thanks very much, John. First, I just want to say how absolutely thrilled I am to be partnering today with Satya. It's been absolutely great working on this agreement together. I just couldn't be happier with how things have gone. So thank you very, very much Satya for all your efforts and everything that you're doing to make this so successful.
We both view our mission as helping customers succeed in today's new world, a world of the cloud, a world of social computing, mobile computing, of connectivity. And this announcement is really about putting our customers first. It's about extending the power of Salesforce, the world's number one CRM platform with Microsoft, the world's most widely used productivity solutions. And really to go into detail, I'd like to pass it off to you Satya and maybe you can just explain to everyone the details of our new relationship and how all this has come to pass.
Great. Thank you very much, Mark. First, I want to say it's a pleasure working with you and your team. I couldn't have been more pleased that we are partnering across many areas of our business. I want to spend some time upfront discussing what this partnership means for Microsoft, why we partnered at this time and what it means for our customers.
Those of you on the phone are probably asking why we did this deal. The simple truth is that we wanted to bring more value to our mutual customers and be each other's customers in relevant areas. More specifically, we are excited to be working together on the following. First, we will empower people to use Office 365 and Salesforce seamlessly together, whether it's sharing Office documents in Salesforce 1 or analyzing CRM data in Power BI for Office 365. 2nd, we are bringing the leading CRM application to Windows devices, both phones and PCs.
3rd, Microsoft has renewed our commitment to using ExactTarget Marketing Cloud for 1 to 1 digital marketing efforts. And Mark will talk more about Salesforce's commitments to use Microsoft database and cloud technologies with ExactTarget. This partnership is about helping customers extract more value from our technology. It gives them access to the services they need to be productive to collaborate, platforms and enable our customers to thrive in a mobile first, cloud first world. I couldn't be more thrilled to make this announcement today with you Mark and bring the value to our mutual customers.
And with that, let me hand it back to you.
Well, thank you, Sach. And as I mentioned, I couldn't be happier with this announcement. And your team has really been doing a phenomenal job at Microsoft and I'd like to be so thrilled and appreciative of all the hard work of both teams in fostering the partnership and today's announcement. Customers need and they want us to work together. They want this partnership.
They want this partnership badly. They want to be able to work with Office 365. They want to be able to work with Excel, with Outlook. They want to work with all of Microsoft's apps and they want to be able to work with Salesforce. And they want us to work together for our customers' benefit.
Our new native Salesforce 1 app for Windows Phones is going to give the power give our users the power to run their businesses from their Windows Phones. And we see that in the market today. Our customers want to run their business from their phone. I run my business from my phone and I'm going to be running my business from my new Windows phone and I want to thank you for that Satya. And we're also excited to announce that SQL Server is going to continue to be the database for ExactTarget and that we are increasing our investment and resources on SQL Server and that Salesforce will also use Microsoft Azure for exact target development and testing and also research in other areas where we can use Azure through our company.
This is an incredible partnership. It starts with Sacha and I coming together. Our company is coming together, but mostly it's for getting our customers together. This is also about us extending our use of Microsoft's technologies like SQL Server and Office 365. It's also absolutely thrilling for me to hear that Microsoft is going to extend their use of the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.
And what I've seen them do with Office 365 has been amazing. The strategic partnership with Microsoft fundamentally advances our goal of making our customers more productive and successful and it's really the best of both worlds. So I'd just like to open this up now for questions.
Your first question comes from Brent Thill with UBS.
Thanks. Good afternoon. Past partnerships like this have faded over time. From your perspective, why does this marriage last?
I'll take that first Mark and then you can add to it. I think Mark said it well when he said that this partnership is about starting with customers first and their expectations and having 2 leading SaaS applications, 1 in productivity and collaboration and the other in CRM coming together with the integration is what I believe our customers expect of us. They expect us to work great in a heterogeneous environment. And so that's what's going to make this last. It's about keeping customers first and then really reinforcing each other's platform capabilities to serve our mutual customers is what I believe is the long term stable part of this partnership.
Your next question comes from the line of Merv Adrien with Garner.
Hi, that's Gartner, just to be clear. Hi, guys. Very interesting announcement. And Satya, I have a question about how this will work for Office 365 users. There have been prior attempts to link some of tools to other environments in the app space before.
And I think a lot of us probably believe that those things were hand strong because of the additional costs to connect to those other sources. Do you envision making this available to anybody using Office 365 who's also a Salesforce customer? Or will there be an additional charge levied on that?
First of all, one of the things that's fundamentally and mobile first world is coming down radically. And it's coming down because of some of the technology advances that we've had across the industry. And the fact that Office 365 5 today has great REST based APIs for anything from SharePoint list to single sign on authentication to exchange contact information makes it so much more possible for anyone to have great integrations with Office 365. So in terms of cost itself, it's about anyone who's live today a subscriber to Office 365 for a business can absolutely take advantage of the integrations that we do between Salesforce and Office 365. So I think that this is going to really remove a lot of the friction that exists and make it much more seamless for them to be able to integrate because of the modern nature of the integrations themselves.
Our next question comes from Charles Cooper with
CNET. Mark, you've had sharp criticisms of Microsoft in the past. You've questioned its relevance as well as its vigor to compete. What's changed in your opinion? And if I may also pose a question to Satya, in terms of your strategy going forward, is this the start of more collaborative arrangements with companies that have functionality where you think Microsoft customers now are not being adequately served?
Thank you.
Well, thanks for that question. I think what you really start with, I really believe that relationships are eternal and it's the technology itself that's temporal. And I started working with Microsoft first in the mid-1980s and our relationship, of course has changed and evolved as the technology has changed and evolved over the decades. And today we're announcing a very important interchange between our technologies. And 1st and foremost, when we acquired ExactTarget, we acquired a stronger relationship with Microsoft that changed.
And when Satya became the CEO of Microsoft that gave us the opportunity to have an even stronger relationship with Microsoft and that changed. And today we're making another change. And the change that we're making is 1st and foremost, we are committing to integrating Salesforce more deeply with Microsoft's core strategy, which is Office 365. And that's especially exciting for us because ExactTarget is also embedded within Office 365. Its Journey Builder capabilities provide users the opportunity to move through Office 365 workflow.
And we've been so excited to work with Microsoft in embedding ExactTarget into Office 365. So to see them using more ExactTarget within Microsoft grow
from just an
idea at Microsoft to a grow from just an idea at Microsoft to a $6,000,000,000 business and I'm sure will be a $10,000,000,000 business and one of the very largest and most important database products in our entire industry. And Salesforce is more committed to using SQL Server today than ever. And Azure that Microsoft is investing in its own cloud infrastructure as a service is something that we're starting to use more of at sales force. And we think that Microsoft is doing a lot of the right things to encourage its customers to move to the cloud, to move to the new mobile world with some of the advancements in Windows 8 to move to new social computing and connect in a whole new way. And those are the things that have changed.
And I couldn't be happier. I've always wanted to have a closer relationship with Microsoft and now we do. And it's because all these things have come together. So, Satya, do you want to comment on that?
Yes. Great. Thanks, Mark. I think that Mark really covered the spirit and the depth and breadth, I think, of both what we intend to do and are doing and the changed circumstances that are leading to it. The only thing I would add specifically to your question is we want to be a broad platform provider in this mobile first, cloud first world.
So partnerships like the one that we are talking about with Salesforce today is very, very important to us. And we want to have this be mutually reinforcing for our businesses, but most importantly for our mutual customers. And so that with that spirit in mind, I want to approach more from
us. Our next question comes from the line of Doug Henschen with InformationWeek.
Yes. There's been a number of reports on this deal, but I just want to make sure we get some clarity on exactly what appears on Azure as a platform provider? Is this strictly the integration of the Salesforce apps with Office 365, the integration of cloud services rather than making available Salesforce apps on Azure?
That's right. This announcement is not about making Salesforce apps available on Azure. Those Salesforce is going to start using Azure as part of its development environment and how we build software. This announcement is about taking Microsoft's core strategy Office 365 and Windows and integrating it with Salesforce's core strategy, our CRM apps and making a combined offering that offers more value to our users. So the key is, is that we are integrating as step 1, the sales force apps with Office and Windows at a deeper level than was previously available.
And we're also continuing to use and expand the use of SQL Server in Salesforce's core services as well as this first step in development on Azure.
Your last question comes from Walter Pritchard with Citi.
Hi, thanks. Just one quick question for each
of you. For Sasha, on you haven't talked much about your own CRM products here, Dynamics. Just wondering if you could give us an update if there's any relevant impact on your sales and sort of strategy around Dynamic CRM? And then so Mark, you've done a few acquisitions. You've sort of acquired yourself a few platforms and underlying pieces of infrastructure you've been trying to bring into the force.com ecosystem.
I'm wondering how you weigh off development on Azure versus all the work that you've had done in integrating there and you're adding another platform here. It seems like a bit more complexity at the time when you're trying to simplify things.
Thanks, Walter. So today's announcement is about our partnership with Salesforce and the many areas of collaboration for us between Office 365, Azure and SQL Server. And I think us being a great platform provider to Salesforce with those three components and also our use of Salesforce technology and ExactTarget for our own use. I think that partnership is what we wanted to talk about today. There will be some areas that we will compete in.
But at the same time, I think as being anyone who has got a
a
demand of us on those respects. So Mark, I'll just turn it over to you.
I think that's really well said. Satya and I have both been in this industry a long time. And the reason that these relationships work is because Microsoft's core strategy is Windows and Office. That's where the revenue comes from. And Salesforce's core strategy is our CRM apps.
That's where our revenue comes from. And we both want to grow our revenues. So we know that we need to be investing in our core and in our strategies. 2, we do have different development environments at Salesforce, but those development environments truly are transparent to our users. Today, of course, Heroku is built on AWS, Salesforce's core services, use its development core development centers in our own core data centers.
And ExactTarget runs in its own data centers and also in other heterogeneous cloud services. This is an opportunity for us to bring in new services from Azure as appropriate. Our customers themselves don't necessarily need to know about that. What they need to know is that Salesforce's platform is integrated and works well together. I think our Heroku Connect announcement last week was a great example of that where there is now transparent integration between Heroku and force.com.
You're going to see similar integration between ExactTarget Fuel and force.com and Heroku. But in no cases do the customers have to be aware of what is underneath. Those are decisions that we're making. They don't need to know are we using SQL Server? Are we using Oracle?
Are we using something else? They need to know that they're having a great experience in Office 365. They're having a great experience in Salesforce. That's what's important.
All right. I think that's all we have for today. I want to thanks everyone joining us. And if you have any follow-up questions, you can reach out to your usual contacts at either Microsoft or Salesforce or those listed on the press release issued earlier today. So thanks and you may all disconnect.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.