Salesforce and AWS forge deeper alliance

In a landmark announcement at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce unveiled a significant expansion of their longstanding strategic partnership. This collaboration aims to revolutionise data management, enhance customer experiences, and seamlessly integrate AI technologies into applications.

The crux of this strategic collaboration lies in Salesforce’s substantial amplification of its utilisation of AWS across its extensive portfolio. A pivotal focus is placed on Salesforce Data Cloud, the bastion of the company’s most strategic and rapidly evolving innovations. Notably, AWS reciprocates by embracing Salesforce’s CRM offerings, including the adoption of Data Cloud to manage unified customer profiles company-wide.

Key elements of the enhanced partnership include:

1. Salesforce on AWS Marketplace: For the first time, select Salesforce products, including Data Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Industry Clouds, Tableau, MuleSoft, Platform, and Heroku, will be available on the AWS Marketplace. This move simplifies the procurement process, offering joint customers a consolidated view of their IT spend and flexible options, thereby facilitating seamless deployment.
2. Unified Data Management: AWS and Salesforce are transforming Data Cloud into a comprehensive, flexible, and secure SaaS data platform. New Zero-ETL integrations minimise the need for customers to build ETL pipelines, enabling the seamless integration of data across platforms. This integration promises improved insights, predictions, and more powerful applications for users.
3. AI-Powered Applications: The partnership introduces Amazon Bedrock support within Salesforce, enhancing the open model ecosystem strategy. This enables the incorporation of leading AI models, hosted on Amazon Bedrock, into Einstein Trust Layer, empowering AI-driven apps and workflows in Salesforce. This collaboration further extends to securely bringing AWS Data and AI services to Salesforce’s Einstein Platform.
4. Seamless Customer Service: Deepening the integration between Service Cloud and Amazon Connect, Salesforce and AWS introduce Amazon Connect Chat to Service Cloud Digital Engagement. This integration, slated for early 2024, promises a unified customer experience, more productive agents, and informed supervisors.
5. Empowering Developers: Salesforce and AWS are reimagining Heroku as the PaaS layer for AI-first apps across both platforms. Leveraging AWS infrastructure, including Nvidia GPUs and AWS Inferentia for ML training and inference, this collaboration aims to provide the most performant and cost-effective infrastructure for resource-heavy workloads.

“Today’s announcement is an incredible milestone in the evolution of our longstanding partnership with AWS,” said Marc Benioff, chair and CEO, Salesforce. “We’re bringing together the #No. 1 AI CRM provider and the leading cloud provider to deliver a trusted, open, integrated data and AI platform, and ensuring we meet massive customer demand for our products on the AWS Marketplace. With these enhancements to our partnership, we’re enabling all of our customers to be more innovative, productive and successful in this new AI era.”

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky echoed the sentiment, “Salesforce and AWS make it easy for developers to securely access and leverage data and generative AI technologies to drive rapid transformation for their organisations and industries,” said Selipsky. “With this expanded partnership, our joint customers gain powerful new ways to innovate, collaborate, and build more customer-focused applications using the broadest and deepest set of cloud services.”

As the partnership unfolds, industry leaders such as State Farm and 3M share their anticipation for unlocking even more value through the extended collaboration. The new product integrations are expected to roll out in 2024, with select Salesforce products now available for purchase through AWS Marketplace in the U.S., and expanded support planned for 2024.

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