Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff

Amazon has solidified its relationship with Salesforce in the cloud, announcing today that the San Francisco-based tech company has chosen Amazon Web Services as its “preferred public cloud infrastructure provider.”

The announcement means that Salesforce will expand its use of AWS to include its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud and Analytics Cloud as part of the international expansion of those services.

It’s a high-profile win for Amazon Web Services, which competes against Microsoft, Google and others in the public cloud. Relations between Microsoft and Salesforce have been warming since Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took over for his predecessor Steve Ballmer two years ago.

Salesforce has used its own data centers in the past, and in that way the move is also a sign of the growing clout of public clouds, which can offer businesses more flexibility at lower cost than running their own servers.

Update: In an FAQ about the announcement, Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris says the company “will continue to invest in its own data centers” while also using AWS “in select international markets to help bring new infrastructure online as part of its broader data center strategy.” Another interesting note: Harris points out that “Salesforce is Amazon’s company-wide customer platform.”

Amazon says Salesforce services including Heroku, Marketing Cloud Social Studio, SalesforceIQ, and the Salesforce IoT Cloud already run on Amazon Web Services infrastructure, as well.

Marc Benioff, the Salesforce chairman and CEO, spoke highly of AWS in a news release. “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base.”

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that Salesforce had chosen AWS for its recently announced IoT Cloud, which is slated to launch later this year.

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