Zurich, Switzerland, September 3, 2014 - ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, has signed a global agreement with Salesforce.com for sales and cloud-based services, offering more flexibility and real-time exchange of information in order to drive sales performance.
The agreement will enable a new level of collaboration across ABB's global sales and service teams as well as in interaction with customers and partners, through an open, shared ABB platform. The two companies will work together to improve and enhance the platform and to adapt the Salesforce solutions to the requirements of the Power and Automation industry.
By cooperating with Salesforce, ABB will further improve customer and market intimacy, accelerate profitable growth and further step up service and response times for customers.
"With this global partnership, ABB will be ideally positioned to drive profitable organic growth and boost white collar productivity through a new, flexible collaboration platform with a focus on customer experience and increased sales-force effectiveness," said ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer. "Salesforce provides us with the best platform to realize increased responsiveness and effectiveness in our global sales organization and ABB, providing deep industry domain expertise. We are ideal partners with complementary strengths."
All information and knowledge from existing legacy customer relationship management, or CRM, systems across business units and countries will be integrated into a new, global Salesforce-based platform. Once uploaded, information will be available immediately to the entire sales organization within ABB.
"There is a natural synergy for collaboration between our two organizations, particularly around innovation in sales and service and we are delighted to be a pivotal part of ABBs transformation story," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com.
ABB (www.abb.com) is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 145,000 people.
