Marc Benioff of Salesforce speaking at conference. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia commons.
On Monday, the two Fortune 500 giants announced a major deal to join force in a global strategic partnership. Per Fortune, the terms of the deal have IBM and Salesforce integrating Watson, an AI IBM showed off on Jeopardy! and Einstein from Salesforce respectively. Earlier in the week, Fortune Andrew Nusca interviewed IBM CEO Ginne Rommety and Marc Benioff to get a clearer understanding of this major news.
Here are the highlights from their phone interview regarding the landmark agreement.
- Benioff mentions that IBM will support and use Salesforce products internally.
- Rommetty believes 2017 will be the year “AI hit the world at scale”
- Benioff with deference, tells Nusca he has always been a fan of IBM.
- Salesforce turns 18 tomorrow, March 8th, 2017.
- Rommetty’s IBM acquired Bluewolf and in some beautiful coincidence, spawned CRMD.
- IBM and Salesforce currently share over 5,000 join clients -Artificial Intelligence is fundamental to IBM, and Watson is an enduring platform on the IBM cloud.
Quote of the article: ‘This is really beyond my wildest dreams in terms of what’s possible today. And by the way—that we’re able to replace Microsoft’s products [at IBM] is a bonus for us. (laughs)” – Marc Benioff to Andrew Nusca
