Salesforce signs a big new deal with Microsoft's cloud to power one of its core products

• Salesforce has picked Microsoft Azure as the public cloud provider for its Marketing Cloud product, as the two companies double down on their existing partnership.
• Salesforce will also build a new integration between its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products and Microsoft Teams, to make life easier for customers using both.
• Salesforce already has partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud for cloud computing services. AWS, in particular, is known to be Salesforce's primary cloud platform, hosting a huge chunk of the company's business.
• But Salesforce says this new partnership with Microsoft Azure won't impact its relationship with and usage of AWS.
• Read more on the Business Insider homepage.

Salesforce is doubling down on its partnership with Microsoft, with which it's also sometimes been a foe.

Microsoft Azure is now the public cloud behind Salesforce's Marketing Cloud, its cloud software for marketing professionals. Salesforce also plans to build a new integration between its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud product and the Microsoft Teams work chat app, to try and make life easier for their mutual customers

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"We're excited to expand our partnership with Microsoft and bring together Salesforce with Azure and Teams to deliver incredible customer experiences," Salesforce co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Keith Block said in a statement.

This is an expansion of Salesforce's existing partnership with Microsoft, which was first struck in 2014, and expanded in 2015. As part of this partnership, Salesforce has developed integrations across Microsoft apps like Skype for Business, OneNote, and Windows 10.

Notably, the two have sometimes been foes: Microsoft's Dynamics 365 product is a leading rival to Salesforce's core Sales Cloud, and the two even went head-to-head over LinkedIn, which Microsoft ultimately acquired for $26.2 billion in 2016.

Salesforce already has partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud for cloud computing services, and also hosts some of its services from its own data centers. This means that Salesforce now uses all three of the major cloud computing platforms to host some portion of its software.

No impact on the Amazon partnership

Its AWS partnership began in 2016 when Salesforce chose AWS as its "preferred public cloud infrastructure provider" for its international expansion plans. As recently as 2018, Salesforce said that it "runs the vast majority of [its] public cloud workloads on AWS." Of note is that in 2016, Salesforce said that some pieces of Marketing Cloud were hosted on AWS.

Salesforce, however, said this partnership with Microsoft has no impact on its existing relationship with Amazon.

"This doesn't mean anything different for our relationship with AWS. We'll continue to partner with them and run on their public cloud to deliver global customer success," a Salesforce spokesperson told Business Insider.

Regardless, the deal looks to be a big win for Microsoft, which is generally thought to come in second to AWS for cloud computing services. Meanwhile, Microsoft's surprise win over AWS for the Pentagon's $10 billion cloud contract reinforced its status as a major cloud player.

The companies highlighted Microsoft Azure's global reach as an advantage that would help customers using Salesforce Marketing Cloud "address local data security, privacy and compliance requirements."

The new integration between Salesforce's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, and Microsoft Teams, will allow users to search, view, and share Salesforce records directly within Teams. It will become available in late 2020, the company said.

Slack, which is seen as a competitor to Microsoft Teams, recently announced an expanded partnership with Salesforce aimed at integrating the services in a similar way.