Salesforce Sees AWS As Its Best New Friend

Anticipation is running high leading to Salesforce revealing its quarterly earnings on Thursday. And prior to that CEO Marc Benioff has once again touted his devotion to AWS.

In fact, the CRM maker now sees Amazon Web Services as its best new friend.

Both companies have been enjoying a new strategic partnership for close to a year now, and when asked about this new relationship Benioff replied:

“At Salesforce, we really strongly believe that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and I think that makes Amazon Web Services our best friend.”

It is not the first time that Benioff has expressed his admiration for AWS, as it was more than a year ago that he and Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos had what he labeled a great meeting of the minds on the future of cloud. The two leaders expressed desire to grow that and expand on this strategically.

Benioff, of course, came good on that promise a few months later.

Salesforce opted for AWS data centers to run several of its new software products and expand its services into new geographic regions. As part of this deal, the company made a commitment to spending $400 million on AWS services over the next four years.

Amazon employees, meanwhile, also got rights to use all of Salesforce software products.

But perhaps the biggest reason why Salesforce sees AWS as a strategic ally is to battle all the other rivals, including Microsoft. The Redmond based company had a good relationship with the world’s largest provider of CRM product, but that relationship soured fast last year.

More specifically when Microsoft outbid Salesforce to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion.

And while Microsoft has always competed with Salesforce in the CRM domain, other companies like Oracle and SAP are also putting up a very good fight in the competition to convert enterprises when it comes to using sales and productivity software.

In fact, while AWS may have made its name and fame on offering raw compute, storage, and networking power to businesses, the cloud giant has been steadily adding higher level applications, like email and web conferencing, into its mix.

Which begs the question, how long before Salesforce also ends up competing against its best friend?