Alibaba will be the exclusive provider of Salesforce to enterprise customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and Salesforce will become the exclusive enterprise CRM software suite sold by Alibaba, the companies announced on Thursday.
Salesforce says that the move is due to the high demand from overseas customers:
“More and more of our multinational customers are asking us to support them wherever they do business around the world.”
The San Francisco-based CRM platform intends to sell: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Platform to the aforementioned regions.
The move will prove a win-win situation for both companies.
Alibaba does not have a Salesforce equivalent meeting the needs of small and medium businesses trading through its e-commerce marketplaces or using its cloud computing services so the alliance with the 20-year-old American cloud behemoth will fill that gap.
Salesforce will obviously reap the benefits of gaining sales avenues in China through Alibaba, whose cloud infrastructure and data platform will help the American firm “offer localized solutions and better serve its multinational customers,” said Ken Shen, vice president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, in a statement.
Additionally, the merger will enable Salesforce to store its China-based data at Alibaba Cloud as currently, China demands that all overseas companies work with a domestic firm in processing and storing data sourced from Chinese users.
Notably, on Tuesday, Alibaba opened its e-commerce platform to US sellers for the first time.
