Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), and Salesforce, the top AI CRM provider (NYSE: CRM), have announced a significant expansion of their longstanding global strategic partnership. This expansion includes deepening product integrations in the realms of data and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as offering select Salesforce products on the AWS Marketplace for the first time. The goal of this collaboration is to facilitate seamless and secure data management across Salesforce and AWS, enabling customers to incorporate cutting-edge generative AI technologies into their applications and workflows responsibly.
To enhance the synergy between Salesforce and AWS, the companies are intensifying the integrations of their flagship products. Salesforce will now provide support for Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies via a single application programming interface (API). This integration will make Amazon Bedrock accessible through the Einstein Trust Layer, empowering AI-driven apps and workflows within Salesforce. Moreover, Salesforce Data Cloud will extend its support to enable data sharing across various AWS technologies. These integrations will be governed by centralized access controls, granting customers the ability to manage secure user access at different levels for Data Cloud content stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
As part of this partnership, Salesforce will expand its utilization of AWS services, including compute, storage, data, and AI technologies through Hyperforce to enhance popular services like Salesforce Data Cloud. Conversely, AWS will also broaden its use of Salesforce products such as Salesforce Data Cloud to create a unified customer profile, enabling the delivery of more personalized experiences to customers.
The key highlights of the new and enhanced integrations include:
- Simplifying Purchasing Options for Customers in the AWS Marketplace: Salesforce will now offer its products, including Data Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Industry Clouds, Tableau, MuleSoft, Platform, and Heroku, on the AWS Marketplace. This move aims to streamline the subscription and management process for AWS customers, providing a consolidated view of their IT spend and offering flexible procurement options like private pricing and consolidated billing through AWS. This will enable customers to leverage pre-approved budgets more effectively and enhance business performance. Initially, customers in the U.S. can purchase select Salesforce products via the AWS Marketplace, with plans for expanded product and regional support by 2024.
- Enhancing Customer Experiences Through Unified Data Management: AWS and Salesforce are transforming Data Cloud into a comprehensive, flexible, and secure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data platform. New Zero-ETL integrations will reduce the need for customers to develop their ETL pipelines between Data Cloud and AWS data services. This integration will enable customers to seamlessly unify their data for improved insights, predictions, and more robust applications. Additionally, customers will have the capability to run their code for data processing tasks securely with Data Cloud, powered by AWS compute services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and AWS Lambda.
- Securely Integrating AWS Data and AI Services with Salesforce’s Einstein Platform: Customers will have access to new solutions such as Salesforce Prompt Builder within the Einstein Copilot Studio to create custom prompt templates based on their data. These templates can be sent to preferred FMs, including leading models hosted on Amazon Bedrock. This integration will enable customers to utilize techniques like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with models from prominent AI companies. Furthermore, developers can fine-tune FMs on Amazon Bedrock through the Einstein Trust Layer, facilitating generative AI experiences across the Salesforce Customer 360 platform.
- Enhancing Customer Service with Service Cloud and Amazon Connect: Salesforce and AWS are deepening the integration of Service Cloud Voice and Amazon Connect by introducing Amazon Connect Chat to Service Cloud Digital Engagement. This move will enhance the Salesforce Service Cloud Omnichannel supervisor experience by incorporating Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and agent scheduling. These integrated generative AI capabilities will empower unified customer insights, automated assistance for agents and managers, and a seamless customer experience across channels. This integration is scheduled for release in early 2024.
- Empowering Developers with New AWS Compute and Development Services: Salesforce is collaborating with AWS to revamp Heroku as the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer for developing AI-first apps across Salesforce and AWS. This initiative will leverage AWS infrastructure, including accelerated Amazon EC2 instances, AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia for ML training and inference, along with GPU-optimized EC2 instances for graphics-intensive applications. Additionally, Heroku will incorporate Amazon CodeWhisperer to help customers build applications faster and more securely. Salesforce developers can utilize Einstein Copilot Studio to create custom actions for cross-platform process automation.
In conclusion, this expanded partnership between AWS and Salesforce aims to empower customers to innovate, collaborate, and build customer-focused applications using a wide array of cloud services. This collaboration underscores the commitment of both companies to driving rapid transformation and delivering enhanced value to their customers.
For more information on this partnership, please visit the provided link.
