DEVOPSdigest

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce announced a significant expansion of their long standing, global strategic partnership, deepening product integrations across data and artificial intelligence (AI), and for the first time offering select Salesforce products on the AWS Marketplace.

The expanded agreement makes it easier for customers to seamlessly and securely manage their data across Salesforce and AWS, and safely and responsibly infuse the latest generative AI technologies into their applications and workflows.

“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.”

“Salesforce and AWS make it easy for developers to securely access and leverage data and generative AI technologies to drive rapid transformation for their organizations and industries,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO, AWS. “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.”

To make it easier for customers to benefit from the combined value of Salesforce and AWS, the companies will deepen the integrations between AWS and Salesforce products. Salesforce will now support Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies available through a single application programming interface (API), as part of Salesforce’s open model ecosystem strategy. This will make Amazon Bedrock available through the Einstein Trust Layer to power AI-driven apps and workflows in Salesforce. In addition, Salesforce Data Cloud will expand to support data sharing across additional AWS technologies. These Data Cloud integrations will be governed by new centralized access controls, giving customers the ability to manage secure user access at the folder, object, and file level for Data Cloud content stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

As part of this partnership, Salesforce will expand its use of AWS, including compute, storage, data, and AI technologies through Hyperforce to further enhance popular services like Salesforce Data Cloud. AWS will also expand its use of Salesforce products such as Data Cloud. Data Cloud will allow AWS to create a single unified customer profile allowing them to deliver more personalized experiences to customers.

These new and enhanced integrations will include:

- Streamlining Purchasing Options for Customers via AWS Marketplace: For the first time, Salesforce will begin offering its products, including Data Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Industry Clouds, Tableau, MuleSoft, Platform, and Heroku, on the AWS Marketplace, making it even easier for AWS customers to subscribe to and manage Salesforce offerings. Customers will benefit from a single view across their IT spend, simplified procurement processes, and flexible options like private pricing and consolidated billing through AWS, providing a seamless way to leverage pre-approved budgets and increase business performance. Joint customers in the U.S. may now purchase select Salesforce products through AWS Marketplace, with expanded product and regional support planned for 2024.

- Enhancing Customer Experiences Through Unified Data Management: AWS and Salesforce are making Data Cloud a comprehensive, flexible, and secure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data platform for their customers. New Zero-ETL (extract, transform, and load) integrations reduce the need for customers to build their own ETL pipelines between Data Cloud and AWS data services. As a result, customers can easily and seamlessly unite all of their data to support improved and faster insights, predictions, and more powerful applications. Additionally, customers will be able to securely run their own code for data processing tasks such as complex transformations, calculated insights, data triggers, or user-defined functions with Data Cloud will be powered by AWS compute services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and AWS Lambda.

- Securely Bringing AWS Data and AI Services to Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform: Customers will be able to use new solutions like Salesforce Prompt Builder, part of the Einstein Copilot Studio, to create custom prompt templates grounded in their data. Custom prompt templates can be sent to their preferred FMs, which will include leading models hosted on Amazon Bedrock. This will enable customers to securely use techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with models from leading AI companies including AI21 Labs, Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, and Stability AI. In addition to accessing their own FMs through an integration between Data Cloud and Amazon SageMaker, developers will be able to use simplified tooling to fine-tune FMs on Amazon Bedrock through the Einstein Trust Layer and power generative AI experiences across the Salesforce Customer 360 platform.

- Seamless Customer Service with Service Cloud and Amazon Connect: Deepening the Service Cloud Voice and Amazon Connect integration, Salesforce and AWS are bringing Amazon Connect Chat to Service Cloud Digital Engagement and Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and agent scheduling to enhance the Salesforce Service Cloud Omnichannel supervisor experience. This, together with integrated generative AI capabilities powering unified customer insights and both agent and manager automated assistance, will enable a unified customer experience, more productive agents across channels, and more informed supervisors. This first phase of this deeper integration is planned for release in early 2024.

- Empowering Developers with New AWS Compute and Development Services: Salesforce is working with AWS to reimagine Heroku as the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer (available in the first half of 2024) for development of AI-first apps across Salesforce and AWS. Heroku will fortify its Dyno compute functionality by using the most powerful and cost-effective infrastructure from AWS, including accelerated Amazon EC2 instances powered by Nvidia GPUs, AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia for machine learning (ML) training and inference, along with additional GPU-optimized EC2 instances for graphics-intensive applications. They will also use AWS Graviton-based EC2 instances for the best price-performance compute. This will provide Heroku customers with the most performant, cost-effective infrastructure across resource-heavy workloads such as development with FMs. In addition, Heroku will help customers build applications faster and more securely with Amazon CodeWhisperer. Salesforce developers will also be able to use Einstein Copilot Studio to create custom actions that Einstein Copilot can invoke, which range from workflows in Salesforce to services hosted on AWS, creating a new AI-first pattern for cross-platform process automation.

The new product integrations will be available in 2024.

Joint customers in the U.S. may now purchase select Salesforce products through AWS Marketplace, with expanded product and regional support planned for 2024.