Most of us wouldn’t be taken aback to hear that Salesforce has introduced a new solution that has simplified a previously complex and unmanageable task which its customers can now leverage. This time Salesforce has decided to dip their toes into the IT service and endpoint management and security with their new partnership with Tanium!

That’s right! Salesforce Ventures have invested in Tanium, a security software provider at $9 billion valuation as on June 25th this year. A strategic partnership whose combined solution is expected to release in November 2020.

Tanium’s area of expertise

As digital innovation reaches new pinnacles with passing time, IT teams find it increasingly difficult to deal with the security threats their business is confronted with. Tanium emerged with the mission to equip large and sophisticated organizations with tools to manage and secure their endpoint networks with both speed and at scale. Essentially, they do this through two solutions:

1. UNIFIED ENDPOINT MANAGEMENT (UEM)
2. UNIFIED ENDPOINT SECURITY (UES)

Tanium’s UEM and UES platforms provide end user support and control over server and cloud endpoints. Their solutions are classified into:

• Asset discovery and inventory;
• Software management;
• Performance monitoring;
• Patch management;
• Configuration management;
• Endpoint detection and response;
• Endpoint protection;
• Data risk and privacy; and
• Vulnerability management.

Why now?

The on-going pandemic crisis was an unprecedented scenario that left industries with no choice but to allow employees to work from their respective locations wherever possible. While there is little clarity on whether the trend will continue by choice or compliance, there is no doubt that organizations will become increasingly flexible to accommodate their employees working from places away from the workplace vicinity.  

How then do you make sure that remote networks are safe?

Salesforce and Tanium reimagine the distributed workforce by combining their capabilities and creating a new joint solution.

What happens when Salesforce and Tanium come together?

Let’s analyze what Salesforce and Tanium joint employee service solution will be capable of.

Salesforce believes in empowering IT with the right tools that will facilitate the following outcomes:

• Enabling employees access IT and internal support across devices and channels by self-serving, submitting, tracking and resolving service requests or incidents
• Maximizing IT productivity for both employees and help desk engineers with integrated help desk, asset management and custom workflows that help IT teams automate and resolve incidents faster.
• Speed up incident resolution by harnessing Einstein- AI powered recommendations with a complete view of every employee.
• A dashboard for visibility of all assets, configurations and employee incidents in a single place.
• Ability for an IT personnel to build workflows using the Salesforce platform to further automate common and redundant tasks.

Potential competitors

Once the partnership happens, it is interesting to see who Salesforce will be competing with in the market. The repercussion of the Salesforce and Tanium partnership can result in competition with companies such as:

1. ServiceNow
2. Freshservice
3. TOPdesk
4. Jira
5. Spiceworks

The above software’s provide digital workflow management, help desk automation tool to manage incidents, service management, bug tracking with agile project management and IT management software respectively.

With change being a constant factor in digital transformation, the demand for a set of management and security tools that are attack proof on a diverse array of surfaces, all capable of being viewed on a central platform has become the need of the hour for certain large organizations.

While Tanium could leverage the partnership to fortify its market leadership, Salesforce can capitalize from Tanium’s platform to assist IT teams gain enhanced overall visibility and control their employees’ endpoints. Thereby, extending itself into endpoint monitoring and security.

Organizations can now utilize Salesforce’s development platform and workflow capabilities to deliver employee service management like never before.

What to do in the meanwhile?

Until we wait for the Tanium partnership to finalise in November 2020, you can read about how to secure your Salesforce organisation in our previous blog post on how to check your Salesforce security.

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