Salesforce is the most successful SaaS company in the world. AWS is the biggest infrastructure player and the two giants have teamed up over the years whenever it makes sense.
This year, are expanding the partnership yet again with an announcement this week at Dreamforce in San Francisco. This involves moving the data from Salesforce a SageMaker, where customers can build machine learning models based on that data. When they're done, they can move it back to Salesforce, where Einstein can use that model to power smart tasks.
The entire process is made possible by Genie, the data integration layer that the company announced yesterday.
Rahul Auradkar, EVP and GM for Unified Data Services and Einstein at Salesforce, says that certain customers built workflows in SageMaker and wanted to make it easy for them to work where they felt most comfortable, while leveraging data within Salesforce to build their models.
He says it starts with moving data from Salesforce CDP to SageMaker using Genie as the data conduit. “From there, you build the model and then we meet the data scientists where they are, essentially allowing the data scientists to use their familiar tools in SageMaker to build their models. They can then bring the models into Einstein and run the inference there.", Dijo.
Liz Miller, an analyst at Constellation Research, says the partnership benefits Salesforce customers in several ways. “For those who have data and analytics teams and have been working on AI and models, this makes it easy to bring those models into Genie and open them up to the vast amount of data that Genie can contain. This has been a request from customers, especially large companies, Salesforce executives have told me.” said.
It could also simply involve comfort with SageMaker as the client's modeling tool of choice, or possibly because the model uses client and other external data. For example, a healthcare company may use customer data along with clinical trial data stored in an external repository outside of Salesforce and wants to build the model using both types of data within SageMaker.
“The SageMaker integration enables these organizations to use custom AI models that leverage real-time customer data from Salesforce and clinical trial research together”explained a company spokesman.
Genie's announcement will likely lead to similar partnerships in time beyond this one, as other companies look to leverage Salesforce data in their workflows.
