This morning Salesforce.com and Workday announced the beginning of a closer relationship that’ll see the two enterprise software providers step up integration between some of their key cloud offerings. The announcement, which can be read in full here, lauded the benefits of closer integration whilst also making clear that each company plans on using products offered by the other to add value to their own offerings.

As part of this closer relationship, Workday plans to integrate its HCM, financial and analytic applications to Salesforce.com’s Sales, Marketing and Service clouds, while Salesforce will also integrate its Chatter tool into Workday more broadly. During the announcement, CEOs Marc Benioff of Salesforce and Aneel Bhusri of Workday affirmed the ongoing relationship enjoyed by the companies over the last few years, adding that they had agreed to “standardize” on each other’s product offerings. Because the two companies don’t really have any functional overlap, both had previously been using products of the other in any case.

The announcement doesn’t seem to be that newsworthy at first glance, but the wider ramifications make it more so. Firstly, the timing of the announcement comes on the same day that Salesforce’s arch rival Oracle is due to release its quarterly earnings report, and just four days before Oracle OpenWorld kicks off. In addition, the announcement took place during Salesforce’s new marketing cloud acquisition ExactTarget’s own user conference, when one might expect that any buzz would be about marketing.

More interestingly perhaps is that the Salesforce – Workday partnership comes just two months after Salesforce surprised everyone by teaming up with Oracle to offer closer integration between their own products. At the time, the deal looked like something of an affront to Workday and its own relationship with Salesforce – especially with Larry Ellison saying that Salesforce had agreed to implement Oracle’s Financial Public Cloud and Fusion HCM applications, something that appeared to threaten its existing Workday HCM implementation. Now though, with today’s announcement, it looks more likely that the Oracle partnership was more about Salesforce securing a good database deal for itself rather than any wish to untie itself from its Workday relationship.

So what does the deal mean for end users? Well the biggest advantage is one of cost – pre-integration of products will save enterprises from the added expense of custom integration, and that same pre-integration will of course be a pretty decent selling point for Salesforce and Workday. The reality is that few enterprises rely on just one vendor anymore, and many will likely have the need to integrate one or more products from different suppliers – therefore it makes sense that enterprises will choose a supplier that offers this level of flexibility.

Benioff himself criticized vendors that remain opposed to these kinds of partnerships:

“Not all vendors have this philosophy. They’ve isolated themselves. They think they can do it all. I think increasingly customers will have an aversion to vendors that don’t have these types of partnerships and working relationships in place.”

If nothing else, this deal tells us that Salesforce is determined to find ways it can leverage partnerships like this one to further its momentum and growth. Teaming up with both Oracle and Workday is a win-win situation for Salesforce, and one that would also benefit any joint customers.