Salesforce and Amazon’s cloud arm, AWS, have had a pretty close relationship for some time, signing a $400 million deal for infrastructure cloud services in 2016, but today at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s massive customer conference taking place this week in San Francisco, they took it to another level. The two companies announced they were offering a new set of data integration services between the two cloud platforms for common customers.
Matt Garman, vice president of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, says customers looking to transform digitally are still primarily concerned about security when moving data between cloud vendors, More specifically, they were asking for a way to move data more securely between the Salesforce and Amazon platforms. “Customers talked to us about sensitive data in Salesforce and using deep analytics and data processing on AWS and moving them back and forth in secure way,” he said. Today’s announcements let them do that.
In practice, Salesforce customers can set up a direct connection using AWS Private Link to connect directly to private Salesforce APIs and move data from Salesforce to an Amazon service such as Redshift, the company’s data warehouse product, without ever exposing the data to the open internet.
Further, Salesforce customers can set up Lambda functions so that when certain conditions are met in Salesforce, it triggers an action such as moving data (or vice versa). This is commonly known as serverless computing and developers are increasingly using event triggers to drive business processes.
Finally, the two companies are integrating more directly with Amazon Connect, the Amazon contact center software it launched in 2017. This is where it gets more interesting because of course Salesforce offers its own contact center services with Salesforce Service Cloud. The two companies found a way to help common customers work together here to build what they are calling AI-driven self-service applications using Amazon Connect on the Salesforce mobile Lightning development platform.
This could involve among other things, building mobile applications that take advantage of Amazon Lex, AWS’s bot building application and Salesforce Einstein, Salesforce’s artificial intelligence platform. Common customers can download the Amazon Connect CTI Adapter on the Salesforce AppExchange.
Make no mistake, this is a significant announcement in that it involves two of the most successful cloud companies on the planet working directly together to offer products and services that benefit their common customers. This was not lost on Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer at Salesforce. “We’re enabling something that wouldn’t have been possible. It’s really exciting because it’s something unique in the marketplace,” he said.
What’s more, it comes on the heels of yesterday’s partnership news with Apple, giving Salesforce two powerful partners to work with moving forward.
While the level of today’s news is unprecedented between the two companies, they have been working together for some time. As Garman points out, Heroku, which Salesforce bought in 2010 and Quip, which it bought last year were both built on AWS from the get-go. Salesforce, which mostly runs its own data centers in the U.S. runs most of its public cloud on AWS, especially outside the U.S. Conversely, Amazon uses Salesforce tools internally.
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