Salesforce targets public clouds with Hyperforce
Salesforce has re-architected its underlying infrastructure to make all of its CRM solutions run in the public cloud as part of a program it calls Hyperforce.
Hyperforce may not have been Salesforce’s headline announcement during this year’s Dreamforce – the CRM giant’s big annual conference – but for IT professionals tasked with managing CRM platforms, it is an important one.
Salesforce has long had a strong relationship with Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), and has also built relationships with Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Google Cloud Platform over the past few years.
For customers who opt to switch to Hyperforce, Salesforce will shift your Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Industries, and other CRM products, complete with existing customisations and security controls, to the public cloud according to specific data residency needs and other, as yet unclear factors.
“Currently, Salesforce determines which cloud providers and specific services are used in each location,” a Salesforce spokesperson told InfoWorld.
In short, Salesforce is looking to make it easier for customers to move their CRM to the public cloud, where they get access to greater flexibility and resiliency, as well as fine-grained data residency controls to comply with any local compliance or regulatory needs. Hyperforce is also backward compatible, so developers will not need to rearchitect any custom apps to run on Hyperforce.
Hyperforce’s security architecture plugs into existing identity controls and it provides encryption at rest and in transit. Security compliance certifications will transfer over as standard.
Salesforce COO Bret Taylor announced the new platform at Dreamforce, hailing it as the biggest change the SaaS company had made since its founding in 1999. Taylor also touted “partnerships with all the amazing public cloud vendors to enable you to work in every region you do business”.
According to Salesforce’s 2020 annual report, the company currently provides “the majority of our services to our customers from infrastructure designed and operated by us but secured within third-party data center facilities. In combination with these third party data centre facilities, we also run our services on cloud computing platform partners who offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service, including servers, storage, databases, and networking.”
In this context, Hyperforce looks like the first step toward more of the latter, reducing the vendor’s reliance on its own hardware investments.
“Hyperforce is a long-term project. Salesforce will continue to maintain existing infrastructure and data centers for an extended period of time,” a spokesperson told InfoWorld.
Jason Wong, VP and analyst on the App Design and Development team at Gartner sees the Hyperforce announcement as “the culmination of many years of architecture and infrastructure modernisation that Salesforce was doing to enhance its underlying platform that powers its core CRM SaaS products,” he told InfoWorld via e-mail.
“This allows Salesforce to reduce reliance on running certain products on its own data centres and potentially its infrastructure costs over time,” Wong added. “As Salesforce’s growth comes more from international markets, the flexibility to support regional cloud deployments and multicloud coverage across regions is an important part of Hyperforce.”
Hyperforce is live today in India and Germany, with availability coming to 10 more countries next year. Customers who decide to move to Hyperforce currently will not pay more than their existing set up.
IDG News Service
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