After reportedly having its $55 billion acquisition bid for Salesforce.com Inc. rejected a few months ago, Microsoft Corp. is taking the second best option and integrating its core productivity services with the cloud giant’s customer relationship management platform. It’s the natural conclusion of the steady thaw between the two historical rivals that has transpired over the past few quarters.

The beginning of the alliance can be traced back to the middle of last year when Salesforce.com made records stored on its infrastructure directly accessible through Office 365 and Power BI in return for Redmond’s help with adding native document management features to its platform. The deal marked one of first milestones towards Satya Nadella’s vision for a more “open” Microsoft.

The announcement came barely three months into his rein, suggesting that he reached out to Salesforce.com almost immediately after his appointment as chief executive in an effort to seize the resignation of successor Steve Ballmer. The talks over the proposed acquisition presumably started around the same time, but while nothing came of those, the two-way integration has only blossomed.

The new agreement announced this week expands upon the Office 365 support that the pair rolled out last year to include Delve, a homegrown extension that uses technology Redmond gained through its purchase of Yammer Inc. in 2012 to provide content recommendations. The software will be modified to fetch leads, customer records and service cases from Salesforce.com to help users find engagement opportunities.

That support will be followed by native integration with Skype for Business and the OneNote note-taking app in the new Lightning interface that Salesforce.com rolled out to its platform a month ago. And the cherry on the cake is the announcement that the cloud giant’s mobile app will be ported to Windows 10 in conjunction.

The four additions, which are slated to arrive in the second half of next year, leave little room for doubt about Satya Nadella’s commitment to mend the gap with his company’s long-time rival. But while the animosity may be gone, the reason for it isn’t: Microsoft continues to actively challenge Salesforce.com’s core customer relationship management business with its Dynamics CRM.

The service was predictably left out of today’s announcement and will most likely remain on the sidelines as the companies continue to strengthen their relationship. With their main products now almost fully aligned, Microsoft and Salesforce.com may start turning their attention to more emerging areas such as virtual reality, where the HoloLens could be a perfect fit with the latter’s plans to target the next generation of application developers.  

Image via DasWortgewand