Apple and Salesforce Create Strategic Partnership to Bring Siri to Enterprise Customers

Salesforce and Apple announced a partnership "that brings together the number one customer relationship management platform and iOS." implement features such as face recognition, professional chat and new Siri iOS-12 shortcuts.

Siri clearly seems to be part of it – at least on Apple's side. "If you look at business in general, the voice has not been used as much as the consumer," said Tim Cook. Reuters in an interview. "We will be able to provide sales reps with instant access to items using your voice instead of clicks and through different applications. We are changing the way people work, and that has always been at the heart of what Apple is doing: making a difference for the better.

Image: Apple

The two companies will also work together on a Salesforce Mobile SDK optimized for Apple's Swift encoding language. With a Software Development Kit (SDK), developers will be able to create iOS apps that use the Salesforce Lightning platform as a cloud backend; about 5 million developers use the Lightning platform today, according to Reutersagainst the 20 million apps for Apple devices. The SDK will be launched "by the end of 2018."

Yet these developers are interesting actors that Apple has used aggressively. He announced a "key partnership" with IBM in 2014 and followed with agreements involving Cisco, SAP and others. Salesforce will also bring Trailhead, its Salesforce skills learning portal, to iOS as a mobile app by the end of the year, and has already introduced courses on creating iOS apps using of Swift.

The two companies will be presenting at the Salesforce Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco this week.