Microsoft to take on SalesForce with Dynamics CRM and AI integration

Salesforce has been the market leader in Consumer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. The company was the CRM solutions leader **according to Gartner** in 2014 and 2015. According to the report, Microsoft and Adobe stand on 4th and 5th place in the top 5 CRM software vendors. Microsoft is forging partnerships across the industry to gain its foothold in the CRM industry. The company recently bagged HP Software CRM deal where HP will move away from Salesforce and Oracle products to Microsoft Dynamics CRM for next six years as reported by Fortune. According to the deal, HP will roll out Dynamics to 6,500 sales and 20,000 support staff. Following the deal with HP software, Microsoft has tied up with Adobe to sell each other’s products to mutual customers. According to the deal, Adobe will bring Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud to Microsoft Azure and in turn Microsoft will make Adobe Marketing Cloud as the preferred marketing service for Dynamics 365 product as reported by BusinessInsider. This is a tremendous effort by the company to battle Salesforce with the combination of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Adobe Marketing Cloud against Salesforce Sales Cloud product and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This partnership works for Adobe and Microsoft as both the companies are complementing each other with the lack of sales software for Adobe and lack of marketing software for Microsoft. Salesforce and Microsoft have been on good terms overall, but they have been competing for a long time. Microsoft reportedly outbid Salesforce during its LinkedIn acquisition as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Salesforce has been working its way across the industry, planning to increase its portfolio with recent talks about **planning to acquire Twitter** . In addition to the plans for acquiring Twitter, the company is trying to make its way into Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered platform with **announcement of Einstein** , similar to AI powered platform, Cortana, offered by the company. This announcement came as a follow-up to the **acquisition of MinHash** , a start-up focused at creating AI-driven marketing asistant last year and a direct competition to Cortana Intelligence Suite introduced last year. **Salesforce acquired Quip** , an online word processing service last month in its bid to improve the AI platform before the announcement of Einstein, a platform that would work across its cloud suite and form research groups. Microsoft sensed the competition and had announced the integration of its AI-powered assistant across Dynamics 365 CRM and Office 365 as reported by TechCrunch.