What does Salesforce Hyperforce mean for SA companies?

CRM company Salesforce debuted Salesforce Hyperforce late last year, which it says enables its customers to securely deploy Salesforce apps and services from anywhere, while using the scale and agility of the public cloud.

BlueSky CTO Matt Wright says while there is no indication yet when Hyperforce will be available in South Africa, once it is it will have a number of implications for local companies.

“Hyperforce enables customers to deploy Salesforce’s clouds on the major public cloud providers – Azure, AWS, Google – which provide a secure and more scalable solution to large enterprises,” he says.

Moreover, Hyperforce brings Salesforce environments closer to home in local hosted data centres (AWS and Azure), which reduces network latency and provides faster access.

Salesforce was one of the first companies to offer a full SaaS solution.The licensing model included both the platform hosting and the software licence, and Salesforce provided its own hosting services, before partnering with AWS a few years ago.

Wright says Hyperforce will reduce hosting costs as customers can now host through a cloud provider of their choice. “While it is still unclear what the licensing cost implications will be, the move enables Salesforce to shift from a budget model where it pays for very large infrastructure builds upfront, to a more flexible model with reduced spend as the customer is paying for their hosting. This enables Salesforce to flex more closely with its customers' needs and, ultimately, could help to reduce costs for customers.”

There are also data sovereignty benefits, he says.

Being a CRM solution, Salesforce stores sensitive customer data, including financial and health-related data. Companies that face regulatory and compliance challenges when storing sensitive data outside the country’s borders can now host their Salesforce systems and data locally, which lessens compliance costs and associated risks, he adds.

However, he says, the most immediate and compelling benefit is that Hyperforce enables local companies to take advantage of a multicloud strategy.

Hyperforce allows companies to choose which public cloud provider they host with, and to host with multiple cloud providers if they choose. This helps to lower the risk of a major infrastructure, networking or security outage.

“Businesses can also switch workloads between providers, which gives them more flexibility and enables them to move workloads to their chosen supplier on a more regular basis,” he comments.

Salesforce has not confirmed which clouds will be available or the order they will be released, Wright notes, but given that its sales and service clouds are the most widely used, they are likely to be at the top of the list. “What we do know is that all applications and code is confirmed to be 100% backwards compatible, so you can run all of your existing solutions without the need for costly migration or re-engineering projects,” he ends.