Dive Brief:
- Cisco and Salesforce announced Thursday they will work together on a strategic partnership designed to enable better enterprise productivity.
- The partnership will combine Cisco’s collaboration, IoT and contact center platforms with the Salesforce Sales Cloud, IoT Cloud and Service Cloud, according to the announcement.
- IoT users will benefit from the integration of Cisco Jasper and the Salesforce IoT Cloud to provide better visibility and control for connected devices.
Dive Insight:
As the market shifts, Cisco has struggled to maintain its revenue stream. Revenue for Cisco’s core businesses—switching and routing systems— has been steadily weakening. Last month, Cisco announced plans to lay off 5,500 employees, or approximately 7% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring effort.
As it works to steady itself, Cisco has formed partnerships with big name companies to boost their presence in the enterprise. Just last week, Cisco announced it was deepening its partnership with Apple with a new API called CallKit, which allows apps like Cisco Spark to take advantage of new features in iOS 10.
For both Cisco and Salesforce, the move extends their market reach into a areas where they don't necessarily specialize. Combining platforms that rely on one another for smooth operation can benefit both the customer and help the companies stay competitive in the market.
In the announcement, the companies gave the example of connected Cisco trucks with IoT devices being able to pass data to Salesforce's IoT Cloud. Then, using that cloud, Cisco customers could build platforms to allow customers real-time delivery updates.
