Summary: In a big win for Microsoft, Salesforce is to move its Marketing Cloud to Azure. Currently Marketing Cloud is running in Salesforce’s own data centre. The surprise here is the project has not gone to Amazon as Amazon is Salesforce’s existing cloud supplier. But that relationship only goes back a few years. Before 2016, Salesforce kept its workloads in-house and famously ran Salesforce Force in an on-premise data centre using Oracle databases and Dell hardware. It also used some colocation in third party data centres. Then in a change of direction, Salesforce said it had signed a strategic alliance with a cloud partner (AWS) with a $400m spend over four years. Perhaps given the closeness of the renewal of the AWS contract, the deal with Microsoft is a hint to AWS to sharpen its pencil when it comes to the re-negotiation. But it is also possible (and probably more likely) that Salesforce sees the value in running multiple clouds in multiple environments, while also being able access geographic diversity that Azure can offer. Salesforce partnered with Alibaba over the summer for a push into the Chinese market, and two years ago confirmed it would sell Google’s G Suite (an Office365 rival) and use Google Cloud Platform for some analytics. No doubt there will be more hints about Salesforce’s plans for its infrastructure this week when Dreamforce, the company’s annual event is on. Finally, it is a fair bet that Salesforce still has some hardware of its own running in a corporate data centre or elsewhere in colocation. Its migration to cloud is not complete.
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