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Dreamforce 2020: Hyperforce shifts Salesforce to public cloud

Salesforce COO Bret Taylor announced “Hyperforce” during Marc Benioff’s opening keynote at the virtual version of the supplier’s 2020 Dreamforce event in San Francisco

Brian McKenna
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Published: 03 Dec 2020 16:45

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, gave way during his keynote at the virtual version of Dreamforce in San Francisco to chief operating officer Bret Taylor to announce “Hyperforce”, seemingly a badge for the cloud CRM supplier’s more intensive move to public cloud provision.

The supplier’s software-as-a-service sales and marketing automation products have always had a measure of delivery over the type of public cloud infrastructure associated with AWS, Google, Microsoft and Alibaba.

But Hyperforce announces a significant increase in the use of infrastructure from, it would seem, the big four of the public cloud, and on a worldwide basis.

A company spokesperson has confirmed Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba as partners, and added: “Hyperforce is a long-term project. Salesforce will continue to maintain existing infrastructure and datacentres for an extended period of time.”

Founded in 1999, Salesforce pre-dates AWS, founded in 2006, by seven years.

Salesforce Hyperforce is being described as a “reimagination of the company’s platform architecture, built to securely and reliably deliver the Salesforce Customer 360, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Industries and more, on major public clouds”.

Taylor said in a press statement: “Salesforce Hyperforce is a quantum leap forward in how Salesforce can accelerate our global customers’ digital transformations and empower them to grow, fast and at scale, on our trusted platform.”

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In the keynote, he said: “We created the Customer 360 as the answer to how you can go digital fast. It’s how you can get a single source of truth for your customers across sales, customer service, ecommerce and marketing. A single source of truth for your data that you can see and understand with [2019 acquisition] Tableau. And with [2018 acquisition] Mulesoft you can connect all those legacy systems so they become an asset rather than a liability.”

He then went on to announce that the company has been working on Hyperforce for two years. “The most significant technological shift in this platform since Mark and Parker [Harris] created it 21 years ago,” said Taylor.  

Hyperforce is, he said, already live in India and Germany, and will be in 10 other countries in 2021, calling it “100% backwards compatible”.

In the statement, the supplier said: “With the elasticity of public cloud, customers can more easily access compute capacity as required to be more flexible and efficient. Hyperforce allows resources to be deployed in the public cloud quickly and easily – reducing implementation time from months to just weeks or even days.

“Hyperforce’s security architecture limits users to appropriate levels of access to customer data, protecting sensitive information from human error or misconfiguration. Encryption, at rest and in transit, comes standard, ensuring the privacy and the security of data.”

Slack

Also with Benioff onstage – or on a set of steps near Salesforce Tower in San Francisco – was Stewart Butterfield, CEO of messaging and collaboration software supplier Slack, whose $27.7bn acquisition by Salesforce was announced on the eve of Dreamforce 2020.

“Slack has done a great job of taking conversation, context and decision making to applications,” said Butterfield. That, combined with Salesforce’s technology, will enable “end to end digital transformation”.

“We will remember this moment a couple of decades from now,” he said. “It’s like the IBM S/370, the Apple II, the Windows 95 launch and the invention of the cloud. It’s a pivotal moment, an opportunity to transform the way we work so we are not as reliant on the physical.”

Benioff described his own desktop as already including Slack, as well as Salesforce applications, including last year’s acquisition, Tableau.

The keynote featured Salesforce customer Bentley Motors, which has been reportedly using the supplier’s software to “give its employees a 360-degree view of customers – connecting Bentley Motors’ sales, service and marketing organisations to deliver a white-glove, personalised experience to customers,” according to a statement.

Adrian Hallmark, chairman and CEO of Bentley Motors, said: “Combining our values and vision with Salesforce’s technology will enable us to fundamentally reinvent our brand for the next century by evolving the way we engage with our customers digitally – not only to supplement the real-world experience but to create deeper, long-lasting relationships with our customers.”

The keynote was hosted by English comedian James Corden and concluded with a performance by US heavy metal band Metallica.

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