Salesforce has announced that several of its solutions are now listed on the UK AWS Marketplace. The listing follows that of the US and Europe, including Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain.
There are now AWS marketplace listings for Data Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Industry Clouds, Tableau, MuleSoft, Platform, and Heroku. This is good news for customers of AWS and Salesforce as it will simplify how they manage their subscriptions in the future.
Paul O’Sullivan, UKI CTO and SVP of Solution Engineering, Salesforce, commented, “Today is a significant moment in our strategic partnership with AWS. With our combined offering and expertise, we’re enabling UK customers to accelerate the deployment of Salesforce products and generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies through seamless buying and billing experiences.
“The expansion of our partnership will better respond to customer demand in an AI-first digital economy, offering enhanced access to new opportunities to innovate and experiment, in turn driving better outcomes and faster time to value.”
Enterprise spoke to O’Sullivan about the announcement.
Expanding the relationship
It is noticeable that only the US and Europe are included in the current listings, and even AWS regions in Stockholm and Geneva are omitted. O’Sullivan replied, “Further expansion with the AWS Marketplace partnership will expand across multiple European regions and, over time, more global regions.”
O’Sullivan was unable to put a timescale against this. However, it will likely include the Middle East as well, where it recently announced the availability of Hyperforce, its next-generation infrastructure hosted on AWS.
While Tableau already had a couple of listings on the AWS Marketplace, these were specific instances such as the Tableau Racial Equity Data Hub Starter Data and Workbooks and the
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Data Hub. Now, customers can access the cloud based version of Tableau as well as several other Salesforce solutions noted above.
However, this is not the full suite of solutions, and notably, Marketing Cloud is currently missing. I asked O’Sullivan when and if we might see other solutions.
O’Sullivan replied, “When we look at Marketing Cloud and all of our Salesforce services and products, our goal is to make them available and accessible to as many customers as we possibly can, to help them achieve their ambitions wherever they might need their products and services.”
Another point is that Einstein was omitted from the announcement. The only European instance is currently in Germany, outside the UK. I asked O’Sullivan whether that would change in the future.
He responded, “It will change in the future, and we’ll see more expansion. At present, that’s where it’s hosted. But even the Einstein 1 Platform is made up of many different services.”
O’Sullivan refers to the fact that Einstein 1 leverages multiple AI platforms, including AWS, and those services may be located elsewhere, including the UK.
Who benefits from this?
There are three beneficiaries from this announcement. AWS adds another major software provider to its marketplace listings. As Salesforce has shown, having a vibrant ecosystem is vitally important. In adding Salesforce to the list it shows that AWS has access to a wide range of enterprise solutions that is now going head to head against the Oracle and Microsoft platforms in the SaaS arena, even if it doesn’t have its own SaaS solutions.
For Salesforce, it gives them access to a wider set of AWS customers, that may wish to stay on AWS and were not aware that Salesforce is available within their ecosystem. For customers, it delivers several benefits. They can have a single view across their IT spend, combining subscriptions within the AWS consolidated billing. Salesforce will also support “private pricing” on the marketplace.
I asked O‘Sullivan what that meant. He answered, “Where we have existing agreements with customers, we want to honour those.”
Will customers be able to transfer their agreed pricing onto the AWS marketplace?
“We’ll work in conjunction with our customers and our AWS counterparts to position and price accordingly.”
New Salesforce customers will also have a simplified onboarding experience, with onboarding for existing AWS customers streamlined through the marketplace.
The bigger picture
I asked O’Sullivan to put this announcement within the context of the partnership and what will happen next.
“Obviously, I can’t speak on behalf of AWS, but our partnership is going from strength to strength. We’ve been using and working with AWS now for many, many years. You’ve seen our move to Hyper force. This offers us, in partnership with AWS, more resilience and scalability.
“When I look at the access to services that we can have in conjunction with AWS through the technology that we provide at Salesforce, things like bring your own lake or bring your own model being accessible through the Einstein 1 Platform working in conjunction with AWS. This is where our joint customers will get the most benefit out of our partnership.
“It will probably go from strength to strength. We’re going to see deeper opportunities to do more customer transformation overall. Because we know that our customers will be looking to optimise where possible and looking to gain efficiencies from not just Salesforce technologies but also AWS. This brings both of those things closer together. With the customer in mind, we’ll be able to unlock greater transformation capabilities for our customers.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Over the last few months, many significant vendors have added listings to the AWS marketplace or deepened relationships with AWS, including Precisely, Azul, Planview, and Pipefy. The marketplace now has thousands and listings, helping customers find the solutions they want within their cloud platform of choice.
With Salesforce now adding its solutions to the platform, it will enable AWS to capture a bigger share of the market, with customers already using Salesforce on AWS now able to add more capabilities from AWS or vice-versa without the friction of onboarding that often occurs.
The big question is how it will impact the revenues of big companies. For AWS almost certainly positive. For Salesforce, will this mean that prospects are tempted to look at other options available on the AWS platform as well?
