Expanded integration lets Salesforce sell through AWS

Salesforce and AWS are expanding their integration and now many of Salesforce’s core products can be purchased through the AWS Marketplace. In addition, the CRM giant is launching connections for AWS’ cloud that will make it easier to customize large language models.

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This expansion of their existing long-term partnership was announced Monday at the AWS re:Invent 2023 conference. There are four main new features.

• Simplified product access: Salesforce will make its core products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Tableau, MuleSoft, and Heroku, available for purchase through the AWS Marketplace. This will provide joint customers with a streamlined purchasing experience and enable them to leverage AWS credits for Salesforce purchases.
• AI innovation: Salesforce and AWS will collaborate to empower developers to build and deploy AI-powered applications seamlessly. This includes enabling Salesforce Prompt Builder to integrate with large language models hosted on Amazon Bedrock and utilizing the Einstein Trust Layer for secure fine-tuning of neural networks.
• Heroku AI enhancements: Salesforce will enhance the AI capabilities of its Heroku application platform by leveraging AWS’s AI-optimized infrastructure, including AWS Trainium, AWS Inferentia and third-party graphics cards. Additionally, Heroku dynos (virtualized Linux containers) powered by AWS Graviton CPUs will be offered for cost-sensitive workloads.
• Data cloud integration: Salesforce and AWS will integrate their data management capabilities to streamline data access and utilization for Salesforce’s Data Cloud platform. This integration will enable seamless data exchange between Salesforce and AWS services.

At first, Salesforce is making only a limited number of products available via AWS Marketplace and only to customers in the U.S. It plans to add more products and regions next year. 

Why we care. This should make it easier for marketers to access the tools and data they need to do their jobs more effectively, helping to improve the customer experience, generate more leads and increase ROI. However, it may also increase vendor lock-in, making it more difficult and expensive to switch to other providers in the future.

Prompt building and sharing

In September, Salesforce debuted a tool called the Salesforce Prompt Builder that helps developers find the best version of each AI prompt used by their company’s employees. Those optimized versions can be saved as templates and shared with users.

As part of its expanded partnership with AWS, Salesforce will enable customers to send prompts created with Salesforce Prompt Builder to large language models hosted on Amazon Bedrock. Additionally, customers can customize those language models using the Einstein Trust Layer. The latter tool makes it possible to fine-tune neural networks on datasets stored in Salesforce without giving those neural networks access to sensitive business information.