As we await Oracle ORCL +0.96% earnings at market close on Wed. Salesforce.com CRM +4.17% and its vocal chief executive Marc Benioff don’t want to share the spotlight. Salesforce and Workday WDAY +2.51% have announced a new partnership that will include each company’s products within the others’ systems, with details to come also at market close.
Benioff already had his turn on Tues. when he unveiled a reorganization of Salesforce’s key marketing unit to integrate acquisition ExactTarget ET NaN% during the first day of the Connections conference. The new unit is a mouthful–Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud–and creates an even broader stack of marketing tools for Salesforce, which had already acquired its way to a stack of social marketing and listening tools, but added email marketing capability and more traditional user data analytics when it bought ExactTarget for $2.5 billion in June.
In came Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget CEO and now chief of the combined unit. Absent, from the company’s press release at least, was Buddy Media’s Michael Lazerow, who while his title within the unit has remained CMO for months, took a seat for the major announcement (he seemed pretty happy with it based on his tweets). The biggest takeaway from the announcement? The innocuously named “Journey Builder,” which promises to track customers from their initial email and mobile touch points “to power personalized customer experiences,” and market to users based on their engagements and where they’ve touched the chain of marketing, allowing for efforts such as retargeting over Facebook FB -0.31%.
Though there were two days left in the Connections conference, that’d be the big news, a major marketing restructuring and new product announced at a marketing event.
As rival Oracle plans to announce earnings at market close on Wed. with a press and analysts call shortly thereafter. Now Salesforce has announced a “and one more thing” deal that doesn’t seem to have much of a marketing connection at all. Salesforce.com and Workday, another major cloud player, announced they will “deepen their trategic partnership,” with details to come on its own call at…market close on Wed.
In a release, the companies said the integration will connect Salesforce’s platform to Workday’s financial management and human resources tools, while linking Workday’s applications directly into Force.com and Salesforce’s collaboration tool, chatter.
The ExactTarget integration won’t be finished until the first quarter of next year with Journey Builder coming in Q4 of 2013. The Workday integration won’t be more thoroughly fleshed out until Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce, in two months.
I will be updating this article as Benioff and Workday cofounder and co-CEO Aneel Bhusri speak to analysts and press. Keep an eye out for a post on Oracle’s earnings, too–despite Benioff’s apparent flair for a scheduling coincidence.
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