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Next Stage of Salesforce-AWS Partnership: Low-Code Dev Tools and Intelligent CRM
Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS), close technical partners for the past five years, announced even tighter product integrations this week.
Improvements announced Wednesday will make it easier for developers to build AWS capabilities into Salesforce applications. Salesforce is also integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning tools from AWS into its customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Together, the new integrations aim to "make it easy for customers to use the full set of Salesforce and AWS capabilities together to quickly build and deploy powerful new business applications that accelerate digital transformation," Salesforce said in the announcement.
There are three facets to the developer-focused improvements. First, the two companies are making it easier to build custom applications via "new low-code and click-to-launch development tools." These tools will let developers mine data from AWS -- for instance, from Amazon S3 or the Amazon Relational Database Service -- for their Salesforce applications "as if the data were native in Salesforce."
Second, the developer integration will enable Salesforce applications to access real-time data from AWS, "allowing customers to more easily automate workflow and maintain a single view of the end customer."
Third, security, identity and access management between the two platforms will be more unified.
"[D]evelopers using both AWS and Salesforce can build unified applications much faster and simpler than ever before," said Andy Jassy, the newly minted CEO of AWS, in a prepared statement. "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."
On the software side, the two companies are promising "new intelligent applications" with this new integration. Prebuilt applications and add-ons will bring AWS' intelligent voice, video and machine learning tools into Salesforce solutions. "For example, customers can activate virtual call centers and empower high-velocity sales teams with Amazon Connect and AWS AI/ML services, pre-integrated into both [Salesforce] Sales Cloud and Service Cloud," according to the announcement.
The integrations will also help Salesforce users deliver industry-specific products more easily. "Customers will be able to deliver new digital experiences and services to remain ahead of industry disruption by leveraging AWS technologies like Amazon Chime SDK (embedded real-time communication capabilities), Amazon Textract (intelligent data extraction from scanned documents), Amazon Comprehend (natural language processing to uncover information in text), and others directly within Salesforce Industry Clouds."
This week's announced partnership builds on the existing relationship between AWS and Salesforce, which in 2016 tapped AWS to be its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. According to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, "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."