AWS, Salesforce Strengthen Ties to Fight Microsoft, Google
AWS and Salesforce announced an expansion of their global strategic partnership to take on their rivals - Microsoft and Google.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce announced an expansion of their global strategic partnership that will help customers to easily build and use corporate apps powered by both the companies. The expanded partnership underscores the intense competition both companies are facing from other tech giants, like Microsoft and Google and sees this as a practical way to beat the rivals.
Combining the best of both worlds
Traditionally, companies that use the two services had to customize the software to enable their Salesforce apps to work with AWS’ cloud-computing service. That back-end effort will no longer be necessary now as Salesforce developers can integrate AWS data and workflows into their Salesforce applications and launch custom applications that easily extend the power of both platforms and vice versa. For example, a company that stores inventory records in AWS, can automatically share that data to its sales team with the help of Salesforce without having to do any custom coding. As Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services mentioned, “With this partnership, we are significantly simplifying developers’ lives and empowering them to develop applications however they want, from wherever they want globally, at any scale.”
Salesforce will also embed AWS services for voice, video, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) directly in new applications for sales, service, and industry vertical use cases. With these new offerings, businesses can also manage their various AWS and Salesforce apps, and employee access and permission protocols, from both of the company’s IT management consoles.
“With a more strongly unified Salesforce and AWS platform, our customers around the world can create a single source of truth across sales, service, marketing, and commerce, and achieve success from anywhere,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce.
Further, the software combo will let customers do tasks like analyze sales call transcripts to identify effective sales techniques or coach junior salespeople.
The AWS-Salesforce momentum
It needs to be mentioned that since 2016, businesses of every size and across industry, as well as government organizations around the world have been leveraging AWS and Salesforce to deliver business-critical services to their end users. Salesforce already relies on AWS as its primary public cloud provider and AWS also uses Salesforce as its CRM platform.
Together, the two companies have launched numerous products that combine services from both providers across phone, digital channels, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data, including Service Cloud Voice, Private Connect, Government Cloud Plus and Intelligent Document Automation.
Those existing and new customers across various sectors stand to benefit from this extended partnership as well. As Victor Bultó, President, Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation, a global healthcare company says, “Unifying our platforms with Salesforce and AWS, gives us the opportunity to optimize our resources and focus our approach by simplifying the customer and developer experience to innovate faster and ultimately improve patient outcomes. It’s how we can reimagine medicine for today and the future.”
Another executive, Alpheus Mangale, Chief Engineering Officer of Standard Bank Group, mentioned, “Technology is ushering in a new era of innovation for the Financial Services industry, where new digital solutions make the customer experience more personal and convenient. The Salesforce and AWS partnership does exactly this, and is helping Standard Bank to innovate faster and provide greater value for our customers throughout the African region.”
In other words, the expansive new partnership seem to make it easier for customers to combine capabilities from the best of both worlds.
Keeping rivals at bay
The expanded partnership underscores the increased competition both companies are facing from other tech giants, like Microsoft and Google, believe experts. Amazon is still the market leader in cloud computing. But Microsoft and Google are also growing their respective cloud-computing services, posing a challenge to AWS.
According to a recent report from analyst firm Canalys, AWS represents 37% of the overall $18.6 billion in cloud infrastructure spending in Q12021, followed by Microsoft’s Azure service at 23% and Google Cloud at 9%. Also Microsoft just crossed the $2 trillion value mark this week, spurred by Azure’s booming growth and related cloud and business software services. Meanwhile, Salesforce’s recent $24.7 billion purchase of work-chat app Slack may also face tough competition from Microsoft and Google, both leaders in business software.
The partnership puts an end to the speculation (at least for now) that Salesforce might debut its own cloud-computing service akin to AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud.
The companies said in a statement, AWS and Salesforce continue to make investments across sales, solution architecture, and customer support to ensure a seamless customer experience and drive customer success. The products will be generally available in 2022.
