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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore the new partnership between Workday and Salesforce, which aims to leverage their combined data assets to revolutionize AI-driven solutions for customers
Highlights
00:18 — Workday and Salesforce are coming together. They aim to offer their customers a merged dataset across the two companies, leveraging their data assets to allow those customers to tap into the AI potential arising from having these expanded datasets. Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach called this expanded partnership with Salesforce a revolutionary deal.
01:01 — Both Workday, successful in HCM and financials, and Salesforce, which has been phenomenally successful in CRM, realize that they don’t have the end-to-end capabilities that more and more customers want and need. But if they work together, they’ll have the opportunity to offer customers a more complete set and compete more effectively against SAP and Oracle.
02:25 — Carl Eschenbach said on the Jim Cramer show, “I called Marc Benioff five months ago and said, ‘We need to come together.'” The reason, he said is the three most important datasets and systems of record in the enterprise. Now, that’s debatable, but I like the way Eschenbach is standing up and making that claim. So, big bold ideas here from Eschenbach.
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03:20 — Whether Salesforce and Workday are going to make this idea work, and if customers will find it fully credible and a viable alternative to what SAP and Oracle can offer, we will see. But the big thing is that what is arising from this for customers is a wider range of choices, more options, more possibilities, and more potential.
04:03 — The real big need in the emerging world of AI-powered digital business is to see those things end-to-end, a single dataset comprising everything across the enterprise. While neither Workday nor Salesforce can do that on their own, they believe that by coming together, they’ve got a chance to do these breakthrough new things for customers.