In a recent press release, Salesforce announced Hyperforce, a new capability allowing customers to deploy Salesforce on major public cloud platforms Azure, AWS, Google, and Alibaba. With Hyperforce, the company redesigned the Salesforce architecture to provide a more scalable platform for its global customer base.
Salesforce is the leading CRM SaaS system worldwide, providing hundreds of thousands of companies with a single trusted source that connects their customer data across systems, apps, and devices to help them sell, service, and trade around the world. However, their solution was built when public cloud vendors were not present, and the company hosted the solution themselves for customers globally.
With a completely redesigned Salesforce architecture built around Salesforce Customer 360 - including Salesforce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud - the company now offers customers a way to securely deploy their Salesforce apps and services anywhere while benefiting from the public Cloud's scalability and flexibility.
According to the press release, Hyperforce delivers:
- Performance on a B2B and B2C scale by leveraging the public Cloud's flexibility to provide customers easy access to computing power. Moreover, customers can benefit from faster implementation time.
- A secure architecture, which gives users access to the appropriate level of customer data according to profiles. Furthermore, data is encrypted at rest and in transit, ensuring privacy and data security.
- Local data storage capability allowing customers to store data in a particular location to support compliance with regulations specific to their company, industry, and region.
- Backward compatibility to allow every Salesforce app, customization, and integration, regardless of Cloud, to run on Hyperforce.
A respondent commented on Hyperforce on a Reddit thread:
What Salesforce gains is the ability to scale out capacity even faster and provide orgs closer to customers (the closest datacentres to India without this are in Europe or Japan, but there is a lot of Salesforce activity there. There are also no Salesforce datacentres in the southern hemisphere -- think of what that means in terms of latency to a large South African customer).
The primary value in my eyes, however, is regulatory - with a push on industries (health and financial especially), there are a lot of companies and governments who are not comfortable or who are prohibited from storing their data in another country (PATRIOT ACT doesn't help). Rather than Salesforce building two data centers in every country (one for DR), they can just leverage the work done by others.
Also, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., told InfoQ:
It's key for CxOs to understand how their SaaS vendor uses Cloud as it has ramifications on capabilities and TCO. For instance, a first-generation cloud vendor cannot offer the same commercial elasticity as a SaaS vendor using a 3rd party IaaS platform. Understandably, first-generation cloud vendors built their own infrastructure - but now they have to move off - to provide both architecture elasticity, e.g., AI / ML processes and commercial elasticity - to reduce the cost for enterprises using less IT due to the Covid19 pandemic.
Salesforce will deploy Hyperforce over the next year and beyond as it opens in more regions.