Three months after teaming up with IBM Corp. to deliver new communications functionality for customers, Cisco Systems Inc. has nabbed another key ally. The networking giant today announced a partnership with Salesforce.com Inc. that will similarly focus on helping users of the two companies’ products collaborate more effectively.

As part of the effort, Cisco intends to natively integrate its Spark team communications and WebEx online meeting services into the cloud provider’s platform. According to their official partnership announcement, the goal is to let sales and support representatives who rely on Salesforce.com engage clients without having to download a plug-in or use a separate communications tool. Cisco presumably hopes that will set its products apart from better-established alternatives like Slack that don’t yet provide such integration.

But while the plan has the potential to make a big impact thanks to the widespread adoption of Salesforce.com among customer-facing workers, it’s unlikely that the competition will take it lying down. This is especially true since Cisco said that it will provide the upcoming integrations using the cloud provider’s Lighting framework, which is also available to its rivals

The networking giant is not keeping all of its eggs in one basket, however. It’s also moving to plug its Unified Contact Center Enterprise platform into Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud. The company claims that the integration will provide a “complete solution” for handling call center operations or, in others, an offering Slack won’t be able to match so easily.

And while they’re at it, Cisco and Salesforce.com plan to link their respective connected device management services to help organizations better utilize machine-generated data. The integration will enable joint customers to manage their endpoints using the networking giant’s Jasper platform, and send the information transmitted by those endpoints to the Salesforce IoT Cloud for analysis. Then, then they’ll be able to utilize the insights produced in the service to optimize operations, or at least that’s the idea.

Cisco and Salesforce.com see the feature coming handy in a wide range of scenarios. Delivery companies, for instance, will be able to use the integration to monitor the vehicles in their truck fleets. The information collected as part of the process could ease the identification maintenance issues and help customers track the status of their packages in real-time.

The only catch is that the functionality will take a while to arrive, with general availability expected in the second half of 2017. The planned communications features are due to launch in the same time frame.

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