Salesforce platform now accessible through AWS Sydney
Salesforce's Intelligent Customer Success Platform is now available from Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Sydney datacentre, the CRM giant announced on Tuesday.
Salesforce Asia Pacific EVP and GM Mark Innes said APAC was one of the fastest growing regions for Salesforce due to the growing shift to cloud and demand for digital transformation.
"With the availability of Salesforce on AWS in Australia, we're poised to further accelerate innovation, business transformation and success for our customers and partners," Innes said in a statement.
Telstra and icare are the first Australian customers to access the platform on local infrastructure, Salesforce said.
"Telstra Enterprise has partnered with Salesforce to help our team digitally transform the way we serve our enterprise and government customers," Martijn Blanken, group managing director of Telstra Enterprise, said in a statement.
Salesforce had announced in March that it would leverage AWS to deliver its sales cloud, service cloud, app cloud, community cloud, and analytics cloud to Australian customers.
The news came six years after Salesforce's Marc Benioff said it was a matter of "when, not if" the company would build a local datacentre. In the ensuing years, the closest datacentres for Salesforce's customers in Australia and New Zealand were based in Japan and other regions in Asia.
While Salesforce's platform had been delivered to local customers via international infrastructure, the CRM giant was still able to join the Australian government's Certified Cloud Services List, which is maintained by the Australian Signals Directorate, for its Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service offerings.
The local agreement comes more than a year after Salesforce selected AWS as its preferred cloud infrastructure provider, committing $400 million over four years.
The company already uses AWS for services like Heroku, Marketing Cloud Social Studio, and SalesforceIQ, and announced in May last year that it would use AWS to build its Internet of Things cloud.
"In our last quarter, APAC was the fastest-growing region for Salesforce, and we're excited to expand our infrastructure footprint to support our rapidly growing customer base in Australia," Mark Innes, general manager of Salesforce Asia Pacific, said in March.
"By leveraging the AWS Cloud, we will be able to deliver the secure, reliable, and trusted services of our Intelligent Customer Success Platform locally."
While AWS is a key partner for international expansion, Keith Block, president and operating chief at Salesforce, said the company is also building out its partner channel, increasingly deploying integrations with IBM.
In August, Salesforce projected a 23-24 percent increase in revenue from $10.35 billion to $10.4 billion for fiscal 2018, after beating Q2 expectations.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at the time that Q2 was "phenomenal" in terms of growth and personally crowned the company as the first cloud software vendor to hit the $10 billion revenue run rate.
"We did this faster than any other enterprise software company in history," Benioff said in August. "Our continued momentum as the leader in CRM, the fastest-growing segment of our industry, combined with more than $15 billion in billed and unbilled deferred revenue, puts us well on the path to $20 billion and beyond."