Apple’s partnership with Salesforce stole some thunder from Microsoft’s Ignite conference

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, speaks at the WSJD Live conference in Laguna Beach, California.Reuters/Mike Blake

• Apple and Salesforce have a new partnership.
• Apple will help the enterprise technology giant create apps for specific industries and better training. 
• The announcement comes the day before Salesforce’s big annual conference kicks off in San Francisco and the day that Microsoft is holding a huge enterprise app conference in Florida. 

Enterprise giant Salesforce has inked an agreement with Apple to build better sales apps and training for iPhones and iPads. 

There are three key parts to the Salesforce deal:

• Apple will help Salesforce redesign its mobile app with iPhone-specific features like Siri integration, Face ID, and iMessage Business Chat, Apple’s chatbot platform. 
• Similar to Apple’s deal with IBM, Apple is going to help developers who make Salesforce apps create enterprise apps for iPhone and iPad that focus on specific industries.
• Apple will create a new course for programmers on Salesforce’s education platform, Trailhead, TechCrunch reported. 

The announcement comes on the morning of Microsoft Ignite, a big conference for developers and IT professionals in Orlando, Florida, where Microsoft is announcing a new customer data competitor to Salesforce. Salesforce and Microsoft used to be closer partners before Microsoft bought LinkedIn, making it a direct competitor to Marc Benioff’s company. 

Dreamforce, Salesforce’s dueling big annual conference with 170,000 attendees, starts on Tuesday in San Francisco. 

While Apple typically sells its premium phones and tablets to consumers, not to businesses, it’s increasingly embraced the enterprise as iPhone sales growth slows and business leaders demand a way to run proprietary software on the phones and iPads they use on a daily basis. 

In addition to Salesforce, Apple has partnerships with IBM, Accenture, Cisco, and SAP addressing various parts of the enterprise. 

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