M+E Daily

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce extended their global strategic cloud services alliance, the companies announced Dec. 2, saying an integration plan will connect the Salesforce Platform with various Amazon products including the artificial intelligence-based Alexa personal assistant service that uses voice control.

The Alexa Toolkit for Salesforce is a collection of technical resources from Alexa and Salesforce that the companies said in a news release will enable developers to “easily harness the power of Alexa and Salesforce together to build compelling voice-enabled experiences.” Developers will be able to learn how to build Alexa Skills for Salesforce via the Trailhead learning platform, the companies said. As an example, they said, developers can build an integration via the Alexa Toolkit for Salesforce that allows Alexa to tell sales representatives the current status of top deals or brief them on their next meetings. The integration is expected to become available to customers in the first half of 2017 at no additional cost, the companies said.

The Salesforce Platform will also be connected to the Amazon AppStream 2.0 secure application streaming service, AWS Internet of Things (IoT), the Amazon Redshift data warehouse solution and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).

The five service integrations are all “designed to simplify and expand how customers capture, analyze and take action on their data,” the companies said.

AppStream 2.0 provides users instant-on access to the applications they need, along with a responsive, fluid experience on the device of their choice, they said. It is expected to be made available in the Salesforce AppExchange as a Lightning Component in the first half of 2017, allowing customers to “easily and seamlessly integrate” streaming applications from the AWS Cloud directly within the Salesforce platform, the companies said. Pricing will be announced at the time of general availability, they said.

Meanwhile, AWS and Salesforce are building a new native integration to help businesses generate value from the many events generated by connected devices. AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices.

Salesforce IoT Cloud connects with AWS IoT to combine device data with customer data in Salesforce, “allowing businesses to create meaningful customer experiences based on real-time activity across all their connected devices,” the companies said. As an example, they said, an energy company that maintains millions of IoT-enabled thermostats worldwide can use AWS IoT to manage the data generated by those thermostats.

The data collected can then seamlessly pass into Salesforce IoT Cloud, where it is combined with customer data in Salesforce. By combining AWS IoT thermostat data with Salesforce IoT customer data, the energy company would be able to automatically create service cases if device faults are detected or create a new sales opportunity based on product usage, the companies said. The new IoT integration is available now in preview, with a full release scheduled for 2017, with pricing to be announced at the time of general availability, they said.

AWS and Salesforce are also building a new connector that links data from Amazon Redshift to Salesforce Wave Analytics, a flexible analytics solution and suite of apps for sales, service, marketing and IT. “By combining the powerful, actionable intelligence and rapid responsiveness of Wave Analytics with the scalability and fast-query performance of Amazon Redshift, customers will be able to seamlessly analyze large datasets,” the companies said. That will allow businesses to instantly explore information, find insights and take actions from a larger variety and volume of data — without investing significant time and resources that are typically required to administer a self-managed on premises data warehouse, they said.

The new Amazon Redshift connector is expected to be generally available in the first half of 2017 at pricing that will be announced at the time of availability.

Customers of AWS and Salesforce Heroku have long wanted to enable their Heroku applications and their resources running in Amazon VPCs to work together without using a public network connection, the companies said. Thanks to the addition of Amazon VPC Peering for Salesforce Heroku Private Spaces, businesses can now establish network connections between their Heroku applications and Amazon VPCs “with all the security and compliance benefits of a private network,” they said, adding that the integration also “makes the process as simple as connecting two Amazon VPCs, and provides the same security characteristics.” VPC Peering for Heroku Private Spaces is now in beta testing, and is expected to be generally available in the first half of 2017 to Heroku Private Spaces customers at no additional cost, the companies said.

The companies also said Canada will be the first new AWS region supported in Salesforce’s planned international infrastructure expansion on AWS. Salesforce customers will be able to use the company’s core service — including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud—delivered on the AWS cloud infrastructure in Canada, with general availability expected to start in mid-2017, the companies said. This will be Salesforce’s first international infrastructure expansion supported with AWS cloud services, and others are “expected to follow,” it said.

“These new integrations across business intelligence, IoT, and developer tools will make it easier for our joint customers to analyze data and build new applications,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said in the news release.

Separately, AWS announced AWS Greengrass software Nov. 30, at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. The new software allows customers to run AWS compute, messaging, data caching, and sync capabilities on connected devices, it said. With AWS Greengrass, devices can run AWS Lambda functions to “perform tasks locally, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices while leveraging the full processing, analytics, and storage power” of the AWS Cloud, the company said in a news release.

AWS also announced a new Snowball data transfer appliance, the AWS Snowball Edge, that it said can transport two times more data than the original AWS Snowball (up to 100 TB), and includes AWS Greengrass, making it a purpose-built hybrid edge device that can transfer data to and from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), cluster with other Snowball Edge devices to form an on-premises storage pool, and run AWS Lambda to process and analyze data.

An increasing number of semiconductor manufacturers, including Intel, Qualcomm and Annapurna Labs, are integrating AWS Greengrass into their platforms so that devices will come equipped with AWS Greengrass built-in, AWS said.

As an example of how AWS Greengrass can help one company, Gary Gutknecht, SVP of Technicolor’s Connected Home Division, said his company’s devices can use it to “monitor connection quality in the home and automatically troubleshoot the steps that used to require a phone call to customer service, often automatically correcting issues before the customer even notices a problem.”