Tighter AWS-Salesforce Integration An ‘Enabler’ For Partners

‘It provides us with some tailwinds that should be able to help us bring more integrated solutions together for customers,’ said Andrew Vose, co-founder and CEO of CopperHill Consulting, an AWS Select Consulting Partner and Salesforce implementation partner.

Greater integration between Amazon Web Services and Salesforce will be an “enabler” for both technology companies’ partners that’ll reduce the need for custom coding, cut costs and quicken their time to market, according to solution providers.

Seattle-based AWS on Wednesday said an expanded partnership with the San Francisco customer relationship management (CRM) leader would more tightly integrate their offerings and yield new prebuilt applications that combine AWS’ cloud computing services and Salesforce’s Customer 360 CRM platform. The goal is to make it easier for developers using both companies’ technologies to build customer business apps, natively use AWS’ compute, storage and database services in Salesforce – along with AWS products such as the Amazon Connect customer contact-center-as-a-service solution -- and connect data and workflows.

Apps Associates, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner, for years has been helping its customers expand the Salesforce platform with AWS services. But, in many cases, its efforts have required a significant amount of custom code and subsequent implementation work, according to Steve Simpson, a Salesforce certified technical architect for the Acton, Mass., company.

“We are looking forward to the increasing capabilities to more seamlessly integrate the two platforms with greater ease, which will really allow us to decrease time to market, use less code and reduce all around complexity to implement and maintain,” Simpson said. “In turn, our customers will have the best capabilities of both AWS and the Salesforce platform, with less cost, time and support required -- allowing us to focus more time on strategizing for their business and less on data integration, workflows and extending cloud-native services.”

Salesforce will embed AWS services for voice, video, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) into its new applications for sales, service and industry vertical uses. Customers will be able to buy prebuilt, out-of-the-box solutions from Salesforce and use the integrated AWS services on a pay-as-they-go basis. Customers, for example, could activate virtual call centers and empower sales teams with Amazon Connect and AWS AI/ML services pre-integrated into Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Or they could launch industry-specific customer solutions by using technologies such as the Amazon Chime SDK for embedded real-time communication capabilities, Amazon Textract for intelligent data extraction from scanned documents and Amazon Comprehend for natural language processing to uncover information in text directly within Salesforce industry clouds.

“Bringing the power of AWS to continue to bolster Salesforce’s AI and machine learning excellence will be a game-changer for businesses to accelerate their intelligent experience across sales and customer service,” said Braden Larmon, vice president of alliances at Atrium, a Bozeman, Mont.-based AWS Select Consulting Partner and Salesforce partner that specializes in analytics, AI and intelligent solutions. “It also will increase the speed at which organizations, through app development, bring the best user experience tied directly to the customer journey and workflow. All this, in addition to reducing the administrative aspects of both tools and providing a new purchasing process, will set this partnership apart.”

AWS and Salesforce will offer new low-code and click-to-launch development tools to help customers build apps that connect data in real-time between Salesforce apps and AWS services. Customers also will get a new guided setup experience designed to more easily bring together Salesforce products with AWS services and simplify service authorization, user identity, security, permissions and data management and governance between the two.

The companies’ new products will be generally available in 2022.

“For more than five years, our customers have benefitted from a tight relationship between AWS and Salesforce,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement. “Now, we are taking the partnership to the next level by integrating our offerings so developers using both AWS and Salesforce can build unified applications much faster and simpler than ever before. We are significantly simplifying developers’ lives and empowering them to develop applications however they want, from wherever they want globally, at any scale.”

Salesforce chairperson and CEO Marc Benioff referred to the expanded partnership as a “milestone” for the technology industry that will enable customers to experience an even more powerful Salesforce Customer 360.

Slalom Consulting, a Seattle-based AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner, hailed the announcement as an “extremely compelling and unique career opportunity” for developers.

“Through this partnership, we will have the ability to enhance the customer experience, improve functionality through integration and -- perhaps most importantly -- unify the developer experience for our people,” said Jantzen Bridges, general manager of the global Salesforce business at Slalom. “We remain focused on growing diverse technical talent with and for our clients. This integration presents unprecedented opportunity for developers to get exposure to and training on two of the most powerful technology platforms.”

The expanded AWS-Salesforce partnership will be an “enabler” for CopperHill Consulting, a Blue Bell, Pa.-based professional services and SaaS-based solution provider focused on the healthcare and life sciences industries.

“There are many things that Salesforce can do to enable customers on the CRM side, and that’s all great,” said Andrew Vose, co-founder and CEO of CopperHill, an AWS Select Consulting Partner and Salesforce implementation partner. “For the things that they can’t do well, AWS helps provide that overlap. For us, (the expanded partnership) brings greater awareness to the fact that the two companies are partners. It provides us with some tailwinds that should be able to help us bring more integrated solutions together for customers.”