Salesforce is to put its new IoT platform on the Amazon Web Services’ cloud rather than its own, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The publication reported that AWS won a significant new customer in Salesforce, the latter marking a major shift in strategy as the CMR SaaS provider usually delivers its applications from its own cloud data centres, known as Force.com.
Adam Bosworth, the executive vice president of Salesforce’s IoT Cloud, told the Journal that the move to AWS was because the firm is “growing very fast”.
“These are big and so you’re using a lot of resources. We had to have the safety valve of a public cloud or public clouds to do what we were doing.”
However, the IoT platform will use a mix of Salesforce’s and AWS cloud.
Salesforce announced its IoT platform last September and it is expected to launch sometime in the next couple of months. The IoT Cloud will use the firm’s real-time event processing engine called Thunder to feed data into Salesforce. This will enable customers to integrate information and insights collected from connected IoT devices into their customer service and engagement activities.
Related: Salesforce launches new field service solution for IoT
Salesforce and the Internet of Customers
“Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers,” said CEO Marc Benioff in a statement during the service’s debut.
“The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create real-time 1:1, proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, delivering a new kind of customer success.”
The service is currently available to select customers to test various features. The firm has partnered with a number of companies including ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx and Xively LogMeln.
Internet of Business has contacted AWS and Salesforce for comment on this story but was still awaiting a response from both at the time of publication.
Chester Wisniewski, senior security adviser at Sophos, told Internet of Business that firms would be well advised to use devices that can work without the cloud.
“IoT ‘things’ that require a cloud service are often less secure, and potentially give way more information, than those you can control entirely from within,” he said.
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Related: Amazon AWS IoT now generally available