Salesforce to build parts of IoT software on AWS

In the ongoing war to bag the highest number of cloud customers, Amazon Web Services has signed one of the biggest. The IaaS pioneer has reportedly struck a deal with Salesforce, the $50 billion cloud software maker which reveals that the latter will build some parts of its Internet of Things (IoT) cloud software on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Salesforce currently manages the majority of its service on its own data centers. But with a shift to Amazon cloud services, it could migrate more of its workload over to the public cloud. According to the executive vice president of Salesforce’s IoT Cloud Adam Bosworth, AWS is a good choice when it comes to handling services that are expected to grow fast in the coming years.

“We did it because we were growing very fast,” he said. “We had to have the safety valve of a public cloud or public clouds to do what we were doing.”

It can be assumed that Salesforce is turning to AWS for its flexibility, as companies operating their private data centres pose a crucial challenge to add new hardware within a shorter time period as their needs grow. With AWS though, Salesforce will be able to bring online new servers and storage almost instantaneously.

“Where we go with this is probably a mix, because there are probably customers who want data to be controlled within our own data centers,” Bosworth added.

The IoT cloud, currently being tested by a handful of Salesforce customers, is expected to launch in the second half of this year. It’s designed, Bosworth said, to run on any public cloud or within its own data centers. With his major leap, Salesforce is the latest to join the long list of AWS users that has already roped in big names like Netflix, Expedia and Adobe Systems. Next in the line is Uber that is already in the news for contemplating a move to the public cloud, taking bids from the cloud arms of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. AWS has become the largest of the public cloud companies recently reporting sales of just over $2.5bn in the most recent quarter at a growth rate of 64% year over year. And with customers like Salesforce running this race together, the growth of its cloud is likely to be boosted further.