Salesforce.com Inc. is ready to push its global expansion and it is now relying on Amazon.com Inc.'s cloud-computing services to make it happen.
An insider familiar with the details said that the deal will write off $400 million in Amazon's favor over a duration of four years. The announcement comes to underline the close ties of the two enterprises. Earlier in 2016, Amazon signed a partnership with Salesforce for the use of the latter's customer-relationship service.
This is not the first ambitious move that the 17-year-old company is making. In the fall of 2015, Salesforce signed a partnership with Microsoft to ensure a close integration of apps and services.
On May 25, Amazon and Salesforce affirmed that the latter is ready to make a strategic shift involving tapping into Amazon's technology for delivering services.
Salesforce has a long history of delivering Internet software from its own servers. However, the company has been leaning more and more on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in recent years as a result of its ongoing expansion and corporate buyouts.
Notable examples are the SalesforceIQ customer-relationship management products and the Heroku software developer services, which are both dependent on AWS. The company is now preparing to tie another of its important divisions to AWS: the new analytics platform for computerized devices, Salesforce IoT Cloud.
Salesforce mentions that Amazon's cloud will come in handy for a variety of products. As a reminder, Amazon already manages global data centers that reach dozens of regions, and it is planning an expansion to the United Kingdom, India and Canada. This means that businesses that tap into AWS have a good chance of scoring big in these markets.
On May 20, Salesforce told the media that it has partnered with an unnamed infrastructure services company for a value of $400 million. A source close to the deal claimed that the mysterious partner is Amazon.
Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff confirmed that their preferred public cloud infrastructure provider is indeed Amazon.
“There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base,” Benioff said of Amazon in a statement.
The company is looking forward to speeding up its expansion in an efficient and rapid manner. Details are expected to land sometime later in the year.
One advantage of a closer cooperation with Amazon is that Salesforce will trim its dependency on Oracle Corp., which supplies both software and hardware solutions to the company.
