Salesforce & AWS enhance partnership with cross-platform integration

Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced a significant expansion of their long-standing strategic partnership at AWS re:Invent on November 27, 2023. For the first time in its history, select Salesforce products will be available on the AWS Marketplace, with a goal of making it easier for customers to securely manage their data across both platforms and infuse generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into their applications and workflows.

As part of the expansion, the firms will deepen the integrations between their industry-leading products, notably, Salesforce will now support Amazon Bedrock, part of Salesforce's open model ecosystem strategy. Additionally, the Salesforce Data Cloud will expand to support data sharing across additional AWS technologies. On the other hand, Salesforce will enhance its application of AWS, including compute, storage, data, and AI, while AWS will increase its use of Salesforce products, each aiming to offer enhanced services and customer experiences.

For the first time, Salesforce will offer its products, including Data Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Industry Clouds, Tableau, MuleSoft, Platform, and Heroku, on the AWS Marketplace. This development aims to ease the procurement process for AWS customers eager to utilise Salesforce offerings. The expanded product and regional support for clients in the US is planned for 2024.

Moreover, the partnership seeks to improve customer experiences through unified data management. Introduction of new Zero-ETL (extract, transform, and load) integrations is designed to eliminate the need for customers to build their data pipelines between Data Cloud and AWS data services, thereby empowering them to unite their data for improved and faster insights, predictions and applications.

Salesforce's Einstein 1 Platform will facilitate secure AWS data and AI services, allowing customers to use solutions like Salesforce Prompt Builder to create custom prompt templates grounded in their data. This development will enable customers to use techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with models from leading AI companies including AI21 Labs, Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, and Stability AI.

The updated partnership will feature seamless customer service with Service Cloud and Amazon Connect, with enhancements planned for release in early 2024. Additionally, Salesforce developers will be able to use Einstein Copilot Studio to create custom actions invoking workflows across Salesforce and AWS, heralding a new AI-first pattern for cross-platform process automation.

"Today's announcement is an incredible milestone in the evolution of our longstanding partnership with AWS," said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce. Adam Selipsky, the CEO of AWS, added that the expanded partnership offers "our joint customers powerful new ways to innovate, collaborate, and build more customer-focused applications using the broadest and deepest set of cloud services."

Among the companies benefiting from the expanded relationship are insurance industry leader State Farm, and the science-focused manufacturer, 3M, both of which have expressed anticipation at the value this further collaboration presents.

The new product integrations will be available in 2024.