Microsoft Corporation will partner with Adobe Inc. and C3.ai to compete with Saleforce.com Inc., the market leader of customer-software, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft, the globe’s leading software maker, has been trying to catch up with Salesforce for more than 15 years, the top vendor in the $56 billion customer-relations management software market.
- C3 to launch a new customer-relations management software program combining artificial intelligence tools with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 CRM software and Adobe’s marketing and advertising cloud
- C3 offering brings various data from a client’s internal systems and outside information, such as social media sentiment and regulatory filings for forecasting purposes.
- Customer-software is a fragmented market; Salesforce had a 20% share in 2019, Dynamics 2.6%, but the most popular choice in Gartner’s data was “other” with 68%.
- The fragmented market is an opportunity for Microsoft, C3, and Adobe to shift to cloud computing and apply AI tools to analyze formerly siloed data sets.
- Salesforce is applying Einstein tools and spent $6.5 billion to purchase MuleSoft to offer products combining customer’s in-house systems with data and apps on the public internet.
Customer-software companies’ stocks are declining. MSFT: NASDAQ is down 2.59%, ADBE: NASDAQ is down 2.63%, CRM: NYSE is down 3.59%.
