It’s shaping up to be an exciting week for Salesforce.com Inc. users. Three days after introducing new security functionality designed to combat data theft, the customer relationship management giant is integrating its popular inbox add-on with Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook. The move appears to mark a thaw in the up-and-down relationship between the two technology giants.

Salesforce.com and Microsoft were locked in a fierce public rivalry for the better part of the past decade until Satya Nadella took the helm at Redmond two years ago and started reworking the previous leadership’s policies. He soon convinced his counterpart, Marc Benioff, to look beyond their competition in the customer relationship management space and explore opportunities to work towards their mutual gain. The executive’s efforts resulted in the announcement of a broad-reaching partnership between the vendors a few months later that saw a number of their most important cloud services integrated with one another.

But despite their best attempts, the rivalry between the two companies soon returned to the surface when Salesforce.com poached the head of Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM business two weeks before he was due to annnounce the latest version of the platform. Today’s addition of Outlook support to SalesforceIQ Inbox seems to indicate that the partnership is resilient enough to withstand such occasional flare-ups. which first and foremost benefits customers.

The new integration can enable a salesperson to look up information about a prospect they’re about to engage without having to navigate away from their inbox. SalesforceIQ retrieves data both from an organization’s Salesforce.com deployment and social networks to provide a full profile of every contact, complete with personal interests and other useful details. The service is also to analyze past correspondences with a lead to try and identify any hidden upselling opportunities that may have fallen through the cracks.

The functionality will enable Microsoft to level the playing field against Google Inc., which has provided integration between SalesforceIQ Inbox and Gmail for quite some time now. Marc Benioff’s firm, meanwhile, stands to significantly broaden the appeal of its application: With more than 400 million users around the world, Outlook is by far the most popular email client in the enterprise.

SalesforceIQ Inbox for Outlook is available immediately for $25 per user per month.

Image via Geralt