Amazon Web Services Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. are teaming up to build integrations that will connect a large number of their respective cloud products with one another.

The effort, which the companies announced today, has two key objectives. One is to make it easier for enterprise developers to build applications that use both AWS and Salesforce services under the hood. Another objective is to enhance Salesforce’s Industry Cloud product portfolio, which is a collection of cloud services with vertical-specific features for industries such as healthcare and financial services.

“For more than five years, our customers have benefitted from a tight relationship between AWS and Salesforce,” AWS Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said in a statement. Jassy is set to succeed Jeff Bezos as CEO of AWS parent Amazon.com Inc. next month. “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.”

Enterprise applications often need to access data from multiple sources. A sales analytics tool, for example, might generate revenue projections by correlating customer purchase logs in Salesforce with inventory data from a company’s Amazon S3 storage bucket. To let an application retrieve information from two separate platforms in this manner, developers normally have to add two separate data retrieval mechanisms to the application’s code base.

As part of their new collaboration, AWS and Salesforce are making the task considerably easier. The companies are building integrations that will make information from AWS services available via Salesforce as “if the data were native in Salesforce.” As a result, building an application that accesses information from both platforms, for example for sales analytics, is expected to become  considerably simpler and will require less custom code to manage data retrieval.

The integrations will work with AWS services such as the Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon S3. They will be joined by a second set of integrations aimed at enabling companies to synchronize real-time data between the two cloud giants’ platforms.

For example, if a retailer’s Salesforce environment ingests a record that shows a customer just made a purchase, the retailer will have the ability to immediately sync the record to the marketing automation system running on its AWS deployment. The marketing automation system can then send the customer a discount code to encourage further purchases.

Beyond simplifying data sharing, AWS is making it simpler to access its cloud technologies from inside Salesforce’s platforms. The companies plan to link the Amazon Connect contact center management product and AWS’ artificial intelligence services to two key Salesforce platforms: the Sales Cloud customer relationship management system and the Marketing Cloud toolkit for coordinating marketing campaigns. Enterprises will gain the ability to use AWS services to automate tasks they perform in those two platforms.

The final set of integrations the cloud giants announced today focuses on Salesforce’s Industry Clouds product portfolio. The portfolio includes customized versions of Salesforce products that pack specialized features for the verticals they target. The Industry Cloud targeting the packaged consumer goods segment, for example, has capabilities that allow companies to check products are properly organized on store shelves.

The plan is to integrate AWS services such as the Amazon Chime SDK communications service, the Amazon Textract artificial intelligence platform for extracting text from documents and the Amazon Comprehend natural language processing tool into Salesforce’s Industry Clouds. The companies says that the move will allow enterprises using Industry Clouds to harness AWS technologies for projects such as the development of personalized healthcare delivery applications. 

The companies’ new initiative builds on a more than five-year partnership that began in 2016. Salesforce and AWS already offer integrations between a limited subset of their products. Moreover, Salesforce hosts a significant portion of its systems on the Amazon unit’s cloud infrastructure, while AWS in turn uses the former company’s customer relationship management platform.

The companies’ collaboration will not only enable them to better support existing customers but should also put them in a stronger position to acquire new ones. The use cases that AWS and Salesforce are looking to simplify with their upcoming integrations, such as moving sales data between systems, normally require significant engineering resources to implement. By reducing the time and expense involved in such projects, AWS and Salesforce are giving enterprises more reason to choose their respective products over the competition.

For that reason, the companies may have an incentive to expand their partnership over time with additional integrations. The more integrations they offer, the more engineering resources they can free up for customers, which in turn enhances their value proposition. 

Image: Salesforce