5 cool things you can do when Salesforce and AWS are integrated

It was only a mere six months ago that Salesforce and AWS announced their expansive partnership.

The partnership aims to unify developer experiences and launch intelligent applications across both platforms.

So what has been the uptake so far across Australian and New Zealand companies, in our opinion? Only a small handful of our most innovative and successful customers are on the journey, so we thought we’d share some of the cool things your company can do when you walk this way.

‍What’s the big picture?

By combining the world’s most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform (AWS) with Salesforce, businesses in Australia and New Zealand are able to leverage fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management.

That’s a whole lot of opportunity.

To break it down, we’ve highlighted some key opportunities, use cases and recent customer stories.

Cool Thing #1: Improved Cybersecurity Resiliency between AWS and Salesforce through Private Connect.

We’re pretty excited about Private Connect. A lot of our customers use AWS as their cloud layer and Salesforce as their app layer and we’ve been able to seamlessly bridge these two layers into a unified and secure experience by directly connecting Salesforce first-party data centers to the applicable AWS region. This creates a secure, private communication across clouds that abides by all data sovereignty rules you can think of.

After, we create a private connection between our customer’s Salesforce instances and their data hosted within AWS we easily route HTTP/s traffic through, shielding it from public internet threats. And since it’s bi-directional, we can accommodate a variety of customer use cases such as making private API callouts to an AWS service such as S3 or DynamoDB, or integrating privately with other PrivateLink partners such as Heroku Postgres.

You can also automate workflows from Salesforce within the AWS instance by using AWS AppFlow. Overall, we have been greatly reducing the chances of our customers experiencing brute force attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, or denial-of-service attacks as there is no publicly exposed IP address anymore for these calls. Exciting.

Cool Thing #2: Pre-built integrations across Salesforce and AWS for ease of deployment

These integrations that can be implemented at low cost, thus reducing the requirement of hand-coding and architecture modelling across various API managers. This also makes it great to connect business-critical processes inside Salesforce - such as invoicing-to-warehousing - without having to go through arduous business analysis and API development. With a quick and simple implementation of these integrations by the Seisma team, our customers have been able to expand their Salesforce usage and AWS flexibility while still managing each platform independently.

Cool Thing #3: Building voice enabled tooling and customer service experiences, or just to document processes.

Whoever would have thought AWS’s Alexa (normally used in the home) would help us deliver critical customer service experiences or document business processes? Fun. The integration of Salesforce to Alexa for Business has allowed our customers access their Salesforce data through use of voice across mobile and laptop as in:

“Alexa, what is the surname of the customer I’m about to go and meet?”

And our call centre customers are able to now implement artificial intelligence to handle customer cases in a human-centred way. Gone are the days of the pre-recorded “Press 1 for Reception” to now universal transcription for all conversations, call recording and storage, and AI-powered assistance through next-best-action recommendations - even anticipating customer questions before they even ask.

Cool thing #4: Streamlined Application Development through AWS using live customer data.

Spending months developing applications without testing against real customer data will often lead to months of delay, re-scripting and re-routing of customer data sources. Excitingly, the new capabilities to streamline application development inside AWS while accessing Salesforce customer data through Salesforce Heroku means our developers can now build according to customer demands, without any “gotchas” post-deployment.

Salesforce Heroku delivers a cloud-native, developer-friendly platform that streamlines application development by integrating formerly siloed customer data and removing the burden of infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus their attention solely on creating customer-centric applications that work directly in solving the customer problem.

Cool Thing #5: Actually mobilise and implement IoT capabilities.. finally!

IoT has been bandied around enterprises in Australia for a long time. Businesses struggled enough with BYOD, let alone connecting device data across IoT tools. This goes across many verticals from mining, manufacturing, consumer goods and retail. These businesses have been

looking to transform their processes with IoT, but without business intelligence, customer context, and an accessible platform.

Excitingly, we’ve been working with our customers across AWS IoT and Salesforce IoT to securely connect a network of corporate IoT devices across the network, and therefore automate actions based on specific events - such as Apple Pay interconnectivity across Salesforce customer data. Our customers can contextualize device data with insight into who is interacting with their devices, what is happening at remote sites, and how their staff or customers are using their products. This leads to greater automation, digital services and strong business logic.

Why Seisma?

Salesforce implementations often require expertise to integrate and transform data from multiple sources. AWS’ data, analytics and machine learning solutions provide a way to transform data into a strategic asset.

The combined expertise and capability of Seisma's Salesforce and AWS practices enables us to quickly support you in delivering end-to-end outcomes and achieve all of the benefits of the AWS to Salesforce partnership listed above.  

Take the first steps in your Salesforce to AWS Integration with our Salesforce to AWS Roadmap experience, which helps your organisation to think big, start small and scale fast. We begin with aligning your Customer Experience Strategy with your Business Strategy then mapping out a future pathway that utilises your Salesforce to AWS instances for future growth.

Want to know more? Meet with us to talk through our Salesforce to AWS Roadmap.

_{*This blog is sourced from acquired company Fronde.}