Salesforce.com Inc. is teaming up with Amazon Web Services Inc. to launch new features that will make it easier to use their cloud platforms together, primarily by simplifying the task of moving data between them.

The alliance was announced this morning, barely 24 hours after Microsoft Corp. struck a similar partnership with Adobe Systems Inc. and SAP SE. The three companies’ newly revealed Open Data Initiative is seen by industry analysts as a direct challenge to Salesforce.

Microsoft, Adobe and SAP plan to enhance their respective cloud offerings what’s described as a unified model for organizing customer information. In other words, the systems will structure data the same way, which should reduce the amount of work necessary to combine buyer records from one platform with those stored in another. Salesforce’s partnership with AWS likewise puts the emphasis on customer information.

The first new feature that the companies announced adds tighter integration between their networks. Customers will gain the ability to move data from Salesforce’s customer relationship management platform and other services to AWS using AWS PrivateLink, an offering that allows for packets to travel over the Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary’s infrastructure rather than the open web.

Connecting to a public cloud directly shields the data being transferred from the security threats lurking on the public internet. Plus, this approach provides protection against certain types of technical issues such as an outage at a third-party network operator.

A company might use PrivateLink to pull Salesforce records into AWS’ Redshift data warehouse, or perhaps export them to one of the platform’s machine learning services. Certain information can also be sent to the Lambda “serverless computing” tool, integration made possible by the second feature that the companies unveiled today.

The capability will let enterprises use Lambda to execute code in response to certain events logged inside Salesforce. For instance, an organization could create a workflow that automatically syncs new leads added by salespeople to its Redshift-powered customer analytics environment in AWS.

This focus on automation carries over to the third and final component of today’s partnership. Salesforce will enable enterprises to use its Lightning development platform to build software for handling customer support requests processed via Amazon Connect, AWS’ contact center solution. This integration will make it possible to draw on Salesforce’s Einstein artificial intelligence features and the Amazon Lex service for building voice interfaces.

The companies’ collaboration builds on the $400 million cloud hosting contract that they struck back in 2016. As part of the deal, Salesforce moved a sizable portion of its services to AWS while the Amazon subsidiary has significantly expanded its use of those services internally.

Photo: Salesforce