for Between the Lines
| November 17, 2019 — 23:00 GMT (23:00 GMT)
| Topic: Cloud
Salesforce’s Parker Harris on managing complex IT integrations and handing the inevitable crisis
At Salesforce TrailheaDX 2019, Parker Harris shared his advice for tech leaders on everything from multiplatform integration to managing a crisis.
Salesforce said in its 2019 annual report:
The company has entered into various contractual commitments with infrastructure service providers for a total commitment of $2.0 billion. The company paid $156 million in connection with these agreements during fiscal 2019. As of January 31, 2019 the total remaining commitment is approximately $1.8 billion and $264 million is due in the next fiscal year.
Salesforce added that it runs its own data centers too, but IaaS providers are a help with flexibility and meeting in-country data privacy requirements. Salesforce is simply executing what every enterprise needs to leverage: A multi-cloud environment if only to prevent being hosed by incumbent vendors. Salesforce can have partnerships with Google Cloud and Microsoft that are win-win enough to keep costs down somewhat. Salesforce likely moves G Suite for Google and the BigQuery integration helps joint customers with analytics. Microsoft wants to win SaaS providers over with Azure and obviously needs Teams to be a success to hold off Slack.
AWS is a bit of a different animal. AWS is a Salesforce customer, but may not need the channel help as much. AWS also doesn’t need Salesforce to use an ancillary product in exchange for compute, storage and other services.
Simply put, Salesforce could be held over a barrel by AWS in future negotiations. Salesforce has more leverage with Microsoft and Google because it can offer more product integration points.
If all of this multi-cloud set-up sounds a bit familiar it’s because Salesforce and Oracle did a similar dance before. Salesforce started introducing other databases ahead of an Oracle negotiation. And presto, we get a Oracle-Salesforce bromance and my favorite graphic in my tenure at ZDNet as Oracle locked in Salesforce on some level.
Here’s to hoping AWS and Salesforce craft a win-win arrangement in any new negotiation if only to have fun with the Marc Benioff and Jeff Bezos graphic.
ZDNET’S MONDAY MORNING OPENER
The Monday Morning Opener is our opening salvo for the week in tech. Since we run a global site, this editorial publishes on Monday at 8am AEST in Sydney, Australia, which is 6pm Eastern Time on Sunday in the US. It is written by a member of ZDNet’s global editorial board, which is comprised of our lead editors across Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.
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for Between the Lines
| November 17, 2019 — 23:00 GMT (23:00 GMT)
| Topic: Cloud