Salesforce: Great results, but must be thinking about future cloud & database strategy (Update 5/25: Salesforce choses AWS as its ‘preferred’ public cloud provider

Tom Paine

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Update 5/25: Salesforce has chosen AWS as its ‘preferred’ public cloud provider, snd will run Sales Cloud on it in addition to previously announced clouds.

Salesforce Partners Surprised By Fast-Moving AWS Relationship, But See Synergies Between The Cloud Vendors (CRN)





Salesforce produced solid results in its first quarter announced last week: Revenue up 27% to $1.92 billion, and a profit of $38.8 million.

While its certainly on a good track for now, one question that's still out there
is how Salesforce will deal with its largest (indirect) pure cloud competitor, Amazon Web Services. AWS curently has a $10 billion annual run rate with much higher growth, although as an IaaS/PaaS hybrid of sorts, its at a different level in the stack than Salesforce. (Actually Google is a larger pure cloud company, come to think of it.)

So its interesting to see Salesforce making noises, at leaast, about reaching out
to AWS. In fact, its Heroku PaaS platform for developers runs on AWS (exclusively?) and its new IoT platform will as well.

Salesforce must have thought internally about providing a public cloud utiilty, but it would be awfully hard to match what AWS has now. Oracle is trying, but there is a sense that's more an afterthought to serve its own customers.

Meanwhile, the old rumor that Salesforce is building its own  DBMS based on Postgres to run on top of Heroku rather than run its clouds on Oracle DBMS, resurfaces.

Update 5/25: AWS snnounced today that Salesforce has chosen it as its ‘preferred’ public cloud provider, and will run Sales Cloud on it in addition to other clouds
already announced.

< Salesforce Surges as Large Revenue Deals Help Drive Growth (Bloomberg)



Salesforce wants to work a lot more closely with Amazon Web Services (Business Insider)

Salesforce claims 'record' quarter record at Oracle and SAP's expense (The Register)

Salesforce Caught Between Two Software Worlds (Fortune)



Circuit breaker failure was initial cause of Salesforce service outage (ZDNet)