Salesforce Strikes Cloud Services Deal With AWS

Salesforce is moving to run its software on Amazon Web Services (AWS), as the CRM provider dubs Amazon its “preferred public cloud infrastructure provider”.

The announcement comes a few weeks after Salesforce.com suffered a major cloud outage in North America, resulting in data loss for some customers. A previous outage in March knocked out Salesforce services for over 10 hours.

Salesforce will use AWS for a majority of its core services, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, and Analytics Cloud.

These services join Salesforce products that already run on AWS, such as Salesforce IoT Cloud and Heroku.

‘Sophisticated’

“There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base,” exclaimed Salesforce boss Marc Benioff on Wednesday.

Whilst this month’s ‘NA14’ outage may or may not have come after a deal was signed with AWS, the incident highlights how infrastructure disasters can cause severe headaches for software companies, and a move to AWS, with the scale it offers, should put Salesforce bosses at ease going forward.

Andy Jassy, freshly-crowned CEO of AWS, said: “Leading enterprises and ISVs around the world are migrating their business-critical applications to the AWS Cloud to be more agile and efficient, reduce costs, and take advantage of the security, reliability, and broad functionality we offer.

“Companies rely on Salesforce to transform their businesses and we are thrilled Salesforce has chosen AWS as their public cloud infrastructure partner, helping them continue to scale, add new services and maintain their incredible momentum.”

The deal will go a long way in helping Salesforce boost its international offerings too, without worrying about expanding its own infrastructure to cater for demand. Data sovereignty laws and data regulations can also be forgotten about, with AWS handling that side of things.

It was last week when SAP announced a closer relationship with Microsoft at Sapphire Now, the company’s annual customer conference. The deal lets SAP customers to run HANA workloads on Microsoft Azure. Interestingly, HANA users already had the option of using AWS, but Microsoft claims Azure is king, with greater processing power.

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