Salesforce, AWS Expand Partnership to Accelerate Enterprises' Digital Transformations

Amazon Web Services, and Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, have expanded their global strategic alliance announcing new product integrations that will dramatically simplify how customers can securely share and synchronize data across AWS and Salesforce services.

The new capabilities will demonstrate the companies' continued investment in delivering deeper levels of integration between AWS and the Salesforce Lightning Platform.

As part of the next phase of their global strategic alliance, AWS and Salesforce 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 SaaS application developers who build on AWS to offer private endpoints as an additional option for accessing their service.

This integration will provide endpoints for core Salesforce APIs within the developers' Amazon 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. 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.

•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. As part of this announcement AWS and Salesforce will collaborate on a new solution that will enable mutual customers to publish and subscribe to Salesforce Platform Events in AWS with unprecedented ease. Events in Salesforce, such as the creation of a sales opportunity, can then easily trigger actions in AWS Lambda and other AWS products. Once processing is complete, results will publish back to Salesforce as Platform Events. For example, enterprises who 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. AWS integration with Salesforce Platform Events will be available in 2019.

•Integration with Amazon Connect for Salesforce Service Cloud: Today, 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. Expanding on this integration, Amazon Connect for Salesforce Service Cloud will enable customers to build highly dynamic, AI-driven, self-service voice experiences with a Lightning-integrated agent and customer community. This may include prebuilt data and omni-channel integration, support for bots, and artificial intelligence (AI) built with Amazon Lex and Salesforce Einstein. Amazon Connect for Salesforce Service Cloud is now available and mutual customers can install the Amazon Connect CTI Adapter on the AppExchange.

Salesforce today runs the vast majority of their public cloud workloads on AWS. Salesforce is now live on AWS in Australia and Canada, and customers can access the Salesforce Customer Success Platform on the AWS Canada (Central) Region and AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, Salesforce's first international infrastructure expansions supported with AWS cloud services. With strong customer momentum across both countries, Salesforce is set to further accelerate its growth in both countries with new locally-based instances as an option for its core services.In addition, many Salesforce services, including Heroku, Quip and Marketing Cloud Social Studio, also run on AWS infrastructure.

"Salesforce's growing strategic relationship with AWS is fueled by a shared commitment to customer success," said Bret Taylor, President and Chief Product Officer, Salesforce. "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."

"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," said Matt Garman, Vice President, AWS Compute Services. "These new integrations will enable companies to leverage the full power of both platforms, driving innovation and building intelligent, connected customer experiences."

Intuit Inc. is a business and financial software company that develops and sells financial, accounting, and tax preparation software and related services for small businesses, accountants, and individuals. "With the seamless integration between Amazon Connect and Salesforce, we're unleashing the power of technology to customize the agent experience through data," said Loren Lacy, Group Product Manager, Customer Success and Sales Technology, Intuit Inc. "We're improving productivity and allowing them to focus on customers, not their tools, to provide the best possible customer experience."

Autodesk, a software developer for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, and entertainment industries relies extensively on Salesforce to manage their customer experience and account based selling and marketing. "The integration of Salesforce with cloud services from AWS helps us know our customers better. We are excited about new integrations that will empower our teams who interact with customers with the information they need, when they need it", says Tzvetana Duffy, Director of Data and Automation at Autodesk."