HITS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce expanded their partnership through new product integrations they said Sept. 25 will “dramatically simplify” how their customers can securely share and synchronize data across the companies’ services.

The announcement was made on the first day of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

The companies have been working closely since 2016. Early that year, Amazon said it was expanding its use of Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) services. Later in 2016, Salesforce disclosed it signed a $400 million deal to use AWS cloud services.

The new capabilities announced Sept. 25 will demonstrate the companies’ “continued investment in delivering deeper levels of integration between” AWS and the Salesforce Lightning Platform, the companies said in a joint news release.

“Because of the deep relationship between AWS and Salesforce – Salesforce runs the vast majority of their public cloud workloads in AWS, and Amazon relies upon Salesforce across various businesses to enhance customer relationships — we have a unique ability to integrate our services and provide customers with enhanced solutions,” Matt Garman, VP of AWS Compute Services, said in the announcement. He added: “These new integrations will enable companies to leverage the full power of both platforms, driving innovation and building intelligent, connected customer experiences.”

Salesforce’s increasing strategic relationship with AWS is “fueled by a shared commitment to customer success,” Bret Taylor, Salesforce president and chief product officer, said in the news release. He added: “Our newest integrations will empower CIOs to securely share and synchronize data across two of the world’s most trusted cloud platforms to accelerate their digital transformation.”

As part of the companies’ “next phase” of their global strategic alliance, the companies said they will deliver the following integrations and a highly secure, trusted framework for connecting the Salesforce Platform with AWS PrivateLink and Amazon Connect:

• AWS PrivateLink integration with Salesforce APIs: AWS PrivateLink will allow Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application developers who build on AWS to offer private endpoints as an additional option for accessing their service, the companies said. This integration will provide endpoints for core Salesforce application program interfaces (APIs) within the developers’ Amazon virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and vice versa.

Exposure to internet threats is reduced by using a dedicated AWS network connection, which privately routes all traffic flowing between Salesforce and AWS services on a dedicated Amazon network connection rather than the public Internet, the companies said. Customers will be able to use their PrivateLink-enabled Salesforce endpoints to do more with their customer data, from big data analytics to machine learning, “making it significantly easier to unlock customer insights than what is currently possible with custom, one-off integration points,” they said.

• AWS integration with Salesforce Platform Events: Building intelligent, connected customer experiences requires complex synchronization of data between systems. “Customers are increasingly building event-driven architectures that trigger processes in AWS based on data changes in Salesforce, and vice versa,” the companies said.

As part of the announcement, the companies will collaborate on a new solution they said will “enable mutual customers to publish and subscribe to Salesforce Platform Events in AWS with unprecedented ease.” Events in Salesforce, including the creation of a sales opportunity, can then “easily trigger actions” in AWS Lambda and other AWS products, they said. Once processing is finalized, results will publish back to Salesforce as Platform Events, the companies said. For example, enterprises that are managing fleets of connected devices on AWS would be able to “leverage usage data to alert sales, service, and marketing teams who are using Salesforce so they can proactively resolve customer incidents, generate sales leads, and cross-sell new services,” they said, adding AWS integration with Salesforce Platform Events will be available next year.

• Integration with Amazon Connect for Salesforce Service Cloud: Currently, companies can leverage Amazon Connect, a self-service, cloud-based contact center service, together with Salesforce Service Cloud to deliver capabilities that support customer workflows between three of the most critical contact center technologies: interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distributor (ACD), and CRM, the companies said. Expanding on this integration, Amazon Connect for Salesforce Service Cloud will enable customers to build highly dynamic, artificial intelligence- (AI)-driven, self-service voice experiences with a Lightning-integrated agent and customer community.

That could include prebuilt data and omni-channel integration, support for bots, and AI built with Amazon Lex and Salesforce Einstein. Amazon Connect for Salesforce Service Cloud is available now and mutual customers can install the Amazon Connect CTI Adapter on the AppExchange.

For more about the AWS and Salesforce partnership, visit: http://salesforce.com/aws.