New Delhi, June 24 (IANS) Amazon Web Services on Thursday expanded its partnership with Salesforce making it easy for users to use the full set of Salesforce and AWS capabilities together to quickly build and deploy powerful new business applications that accelerate digital transformation.

The partnership will drive customer value through new and enhanced unification between AWS and Salesforce products.

“For more than five years, our customers have benefitted from a tight relationship between AWS and Salesforce,” Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, said in a statement.

“Now, we are taking the partnership to the next level by integrating our offerings so developers using both AWS and Salesforce can build unified applications much faster and simpler than ever before,” Jassy added.

Developers will now be able to build and launch custom applications that extend the power of both platforms by connecting Salesforce data and workflows natively into their solutions running on AWS and make it easy for Salesforce developers to integrate AWS data and workflows into their Salesforce applications.

Salesforce will also embed AWS services for voice, video, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) directly in new applications for sales, service, and industry vertical use cases.

With these new offerings, customers can purchase out-of-the-box solutions directly from Salesforce and then consume the integrated AWS services on a pay-as-you-go basis.

“With this partnership, we are significantly simplifying developers’ lives and empowering them to develop applications however they want, from wherever they want globally, at any scale,” Jassy said.

Previously, significant custom integration code was often required for customers that wanted to combine AWS and Salesforce capabilities for their applications.

These new offerings will enable customers to use AWS and Salesforce services together seamlessly through new, unified platforms.

The companies have also collaborated on new low-code tools to help customers innovate and build applications that connect data in real-time between Salesforce applications and AWS services.

Customers can now innovate faster with pre-built applications that combine AWS and Salesforce Customer 360, making it easier for organisations to seamlessly deploy AWS’s voice, video and AI services natively with Salesforce business applications.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company and Salesforce, has announced a significant expansion of their global strategic partnership that will make it easy for customers to use the full set of Salesforce and AWS capabilities together to quickly build and deploy powerful new business applications that accelerate digital transformation.

The partnership will drive customer value through new and enhanced unification between AWS and Salesforce products. Developers will now be able to build and launch custom applications that extend the power of both platforms by connecting Salesforce data and workflows natively into their solutions running on AWS and make it easy for Salesforce developers to integrate AWS data and workflows into their Salesforce applications.

Salesforce will also embed AWS services for voice, video, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) directly in new applications for sales, service, and industry vertical use cases. With these new offerings, customers can purchase out-of-the-box solutions directly from Salesforce and then consume the integrated AWS services on a pay-as-you-go basis.

“For more than five years, our customers have benefitted from a tight relationship between AWS and Salesforce. Now, we are taking the partnership to the next level by integrating our offerings so developers using both AWS and Salesforce can build unified applications much faster and simpler than ever before,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services.

“With this partnership, we are significantly simplifying developers’ lives and empowering them to develop applications however they want, from wherever they want globally, at any scale,” added Jassy.

“This is a milestone partnership for the technology industry, and one that will enable our customers to experience an even more powerful Salesforce Customer 360 and achieve a new level of success in their business. With a more strongly unified Salesforce and AWS platform, our customers around the world can create a single source of truth across sales, service, marketing, and commerce, and achieve success from anywhere,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce.

Google Cloud, which provides organisations with leading infrastructure, platform capabilities and industry solutions, has expanded its partnership with Shopify, a leading global commerce company. The expanded partnership will enable Shopify’s more than 1.7 million merchants to have access to Google Cloud’s technology across a broader set of regions.
In 2020, Shopify merchants generated nearly $120 billion in gross merchandise volume, as more businesses moved online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerated shifts in consumer behaviour. As the demand for ecommerce continues to increase, Shopify’s expanded partnership with Google Cloud will bring data processing and storage closer to merchants in more regions, to further improve store speed and performance.

In 2020, Shopify’s revenue increased 86 per cent year-over-year and Black Friday sales grew 75 per cent from the previous year. “The demand for independent, direct-to-consumer shopping is only increasing, and this extended partnership between Shopify and Google Cloud will mean small- and medium-sized businesses globally will have even more access to world-class infrastructure to effectively handle all levels of traffic,” Google Cloud said in a press release.

As a part of the partnership, Shopify will leverage Google Cloud’s global infrastructure to reduce latency and give shoppers more personalised, engaging experiences, including:

Google Cloud’s network of 25 regions and 76 availability zones around the world provides lower latency and higher reliability, allowing Shopify to provide a fast, highly-available service to merchants around the world.

Google’s Global Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) will make it easier for Shopify to write and deploy applications that span multiple regions.

In-country disaster recovery will help Shopify maintain business continuity across the globe.

Google Cloud’s services will assist Shopify in meeting various regulatory, security, and compliance requirements, which vary region-to-region and country-to-country.

The cleanest cloud in the industry, Google Cloud is helping Shopify reduce its carbon footprint and achieve the company’s sustainability goals.

Additionally, Shopify will join Google Cloud’s Partner Advantage programme, enabling the two companies to partner on joint go-to-market initiatives, bringing Shopify’s ecommerce platform to more businesses around the world.

“Our partnership with Google Cloud will mean that more Shopify merchants around the world have access to competitive computing technologies that would otherwise only be available to enterprise brands,” said Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, Shopify. “We know that during the COVID-19 pandemic from mid-March to mid-Sept, 84 per cent of consumers have shopped online. Improved store speed and performance will give our merchants a competitive edge by allowing them to better serve buyers where they are, and it will do so in the most energy efficient way possible through Google Cloud.”

“Shopify is trusting Google Cloud to help the company scale across the globe, allowing its merchants to handle peak traffic at any time of the year,” said James Lambe, managing director, Google Cloud. “Over the last three years, we’ve worked with Shopify engineering to ensure its business can scale as it continues to experience rapid growth. We’re thrilled to continue on this journey together.”

A Partnership Built on Joint Engineering

In the hybrid cloud space, the relationship between VMware and Amazon Web Services has produced one of the more substantive vendor partnerships in recent memory. VMware Cloud on AWS is not simply a reseller arrangement — according to Mark Lohmeyer, VMware’s SVP and GM of the Cloud Platform Business Unit, hundreds of engineers on both sides are actively optimizing VMware software to run as a managed service on top of AWS infrastructure.

The practical result for customers is that the heavy lifting of hardware upgrades and VMware software lifecycle management shifts away from their own teams. VMware handles those operational concerns, while customers retain access to the broader AWS service ecosystem alongside their familiar VMware tooling.

“I think both VMware and AWS believe strongly in understanding what customers are looking for and making sure we’re delivering that value to them.”

— Mark Lohmeyer, SVP & GM, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware (VMworld 2019)

Traction at VMworld 2019: Growth Metrics

At VMworld 2019, Lohmeyer shared adoption figures comparing the service’s status year-over-year at the time of the event:

• 4x increase in the number of customers on VMware Cloud on AWS
• 9x increase in the number of virtual machines (VMs) running on the service

Lohmeyer noted that the VM figure is particularly telling: it shows not just new customer acquisition, but existing customers significantly expanding their footprint — a signal of growing confidence in the platform for production workloads.

Compressing Migration Timelines

One of the more striking claims from Lohmeyer concerns migration velocity. Historically, moving enterprise VMware workloads to a public cloud required re-factoring and re-platforming applications upfront — a process that could consume three or more years before any meaningful cloud benefit was realized.

VMware Cloud on AWS changes that calculus by allowing workloads to be lifted and shifted to the cloud without requiring application changes first. Because the underlying infrastructure is still VMware-based (vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and vCenter), existing VMs migrate without modification. Lohmeyer cited the ability to compress what was previously a three-year migration project into a matter of months.

“We could take a migration project that would have previously taken three years, and we could do it in a few months.”

— Mark Lohmeyer, VMworld 2019

Migrate First, Modernize at Your Own Pace

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger framed the strategic choice at the VMworld 2019 keynote as: “Modernize and migrate, or migrate and modernize.” Both orderings are intentional — the platform supports either path.

The traditional cloud adoption model pressures teams to modernize applications before migration, forcing a large upfront engineering investment. VMware Cloud on AWS enables an alternative sequence:

1. Migrate quickly — move existing VMware workloads to AWS without application refactoring, using live migration capabilities.
2. Operate in a familiar environment — continue using vCenter, NSX networking, and existing VMware operational tooling in the cloud.
3. Modernize incrementally — adopt AWS-native services (databases, machine learning, serverless, containers) on a schedule driven by business need rather than migration deadlines.

The “live migrate” capability Gelsinger highlighted refers to the ability to move running VMs between on-premises VMware environments and VMware Cloud on AWS with minimal disruption — a key differentiator from approaches that require downtime or application-level re-architecture.

Solving the Multicloud Management Problem

One of the harder questions in enterprise cloud strategy is how to maintain consistent operations across a heterogeneous mix of private cloud, multiple public clouds, and edge environments. Lohmeyer described VMware’s answer as operating on two tracks:

1. Consistent Operations

Management tooling that works across environments regardless of the underlying infrastructure. VMware’s CloudHealth platform was cited as an example — it provides visibility into cloud spend across multiple cloud providers and enables cost optimization over time. This layer is designed to function whether workloads sit on VMware-based infrastructure or on native cloud services.

2. Consistent Infrastructure

Delivering the same VMware Cloud Foundation stack (compute, network, storage) consistently across on-premises data centers, multiple public clouds, and edge locations. The goal is to eliminate the operational fragmentation that arises when each environment requires distinct tooling and skillsets.

Together, these two tracks represent VMware’s answer to the “multicloud paradox” — the desire to use best-of-breed services from multiple providers without sacrificing unified governance, security, and compliance posture.

What This Means for DevOps and Platform Teams

For teams managing VMware-heavy on-premises estates, the VMware Cloud on AWS model offers a practical migration path that avoids the organizational risk of a forced modernization project. Key operational implications include:

• Existing skills transfer: vCenter, NSX, and vSAN administrators can manage cloud-hosted VMs using the same tools and processes they use on-premises.
• Reduced migration risk: No application refactoring is required to move to the cloud, reducing the chance of regression or performance issues introduced during migration.
• Access to AWS services: Once workloads are in VMware Cloud on AWS, teams can integrate with AWS-native services (RDS, S3, Lambda, EKS, and others) without a full re-platform.
• Hardware lifecycle offloaded: VMware manages underlying host upgrades and software patching, reducing operational burden on internal infrastructure teams.

Context: VMworld 2019

This interview took place at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco. The growth metrics, product capabilities, and partnership details described here reflect the state of VMware Cloud on AWS as communicated at that event. The service has continued to evolve since 2019; readers evaluating the platform for current use should consult VMware’s and AWS’s current documentation for up-to-date specifications and pricing.

Infosys Becomes a Google Cloud Managed Service Provider

Infosys announced on 21 August 2019 that it has expanded its strategic partnership with Google Cloud, attaining the status of a Google Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP). The designation positions Infosys to offer a broad portfolio of services to enterprise customers seeking to adopt or scale workloads on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

What the Google Cloud MSP Designation Means

The Google Cloud MSP program is designed to recognize partners that have demonstrated validated expertise in delivering end-to-end cloud managed services. Achieving MSP status typically requires a partner to meet Google’s standards across areas such as technical capability, customer success, and operational excellence.

For Infosys, the expanded partnership means it is now positioned to deliver the following service categories on GCP:

• Consulting: Helping enterprises define cloud strategy and architecture aligned to business goals.
• Assessment: Evaluating existing on-premises or multi-cloud environments to identify migration readiness, risk, and opportunity.
• Migration: Moving workloads, applications, and data from legacy environments to GCP in a structured, low-disruption manner.
• Optimization: Tuning GCP resource usage, cost management, and performance after initial migration.
• Managed Support: Providing ongoing operational support for enterprise GCP environments, including monitoring, incident response, and governance.

Why This Partnership Matters for Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Large enterprises often lack the in-house expertise or bandwidth to plan and execute complex cloud migrations at scale. Partnerships between hyperscale cloud providers like Google Cloud and global systems integrators like Infosys are designed to close that gap. With MSP status, Infosys clients gain access to a partner that has a formally validated relationship with Google Cloud, which can streamline access to GCP technical resources, support escalation paths, and co-developed solution accelerators.

For DevOps and platform engineering teams inside enterprise organizations, this kind of partnership can have practical implications: it may influence the availability of pre-built migration tooling, reference architectures, and SLA-backed managed operations for GCP-hosted workloads.

Context and Timing

The announcement was made after market hours on 21 August 2019. At that time, competition among cloud providers — Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure — for large enterprise contracts was intensifying, and systems integrators with MSP credentials were becoming key channels for winning and retaining enterprise workloads.

Infosys, as one of the largest IT services companies globally, brings significant delivery scale to the partnership, with consulting and engineering talent capable of supporting multi-geography GCP deployments.

This article focuses on the Infosys–Google Cloud partnership announcement. The original source post contained unrelated corporate announcements from other Indian companies (Oberoi Realty, Kansai Nerolac Paints, NMDC, Dilip Buildcon, and V-Mart Retail), which have been omitted as they are not relevant to a DevOps or cloud engineering audience.

Last week the two vendors announced a deep integration, allowing customers to run virtualised workloads on Google Cloud Platform, so what does that mean for the market and who are the target customers?

Following the announcement last month of a major partnership with Google Cloud, VMware workloads can now be run on all three of the major cloud infrastructure providers, as well as Alibaba and IBM.

The deal clearly signals VMware’s desire to set itself up as a key player in any enterprise hybrid IT strategy, while Google Cloud continues to look to prove itself as a viable rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

“Today, we’re excited to announce that Google Cloud will begin supporting VMware workloads. It’s another significant step as we strive to better serve our enterprise customers,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post on 30 July.

Kurian and his peer Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer for customer operations at VMware, each used that post to identify a pool of customers that had been asking for better interoperability between the two vendors, with the Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple announced as a result.

This new product, which will be generally available later this year, allows customers to run workloads on VMware’s flagship vSphere platform natively in Google Cloud Platform.

“This brings customers a wide breadth of choices for how to run their VMware workloads in a hybrid deployment, from modern containerised applications with Anthos to VM-based applications with VMware in GCP,” Kurian added. Google Cloud will also support VMware Cloud Foundation, which was released specifically to deploy and run hybrid clouds.

The wrinkle here is the presence of CloudSimple, a three-year-old “VMware-as-a-service” start-up from Santa Clara. The new solution brings together VMware software-defined data centre (SDCC) technologies like VMware vSphere, NSX and vSAN software and deploys it on a platform administered by CloudSimple, specifically for GCP.

This allows customers to migrate VMware workloads to a VMware SDDC running in GCP to take advantage of its standout services, with a specific focus on AI and machine learning capabilities. Support comes from both Google Cloud and CloudSimple.

“CloudSimple, a start-up, has built a product that allows customers to use the vSphere hypervisor on other cloud platforms. They have a deal with Azure, and now they’ve signed one with GCP,” Lydia Leong, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner told Computerworld via email.

Anthos is where things get interesting, as Google Cloud would prefer enterprise customers to use its own service mesh for hybrid cloud management instead of Vsphere, so there is an element of the two firms being frenemies in this partnership to consider.

“Part of the tension point could be which control plane will be preferred long term? Anthos or VMware products? That is up to the customer to decide,” Nick McQuire, vice president of enterprise research at CSS Insight, posited to Computerworld.

“Particularly for Google, they will ultimately want customers to use Anthos, but equally, if they don’t and are using GCP for IaaS it is still OK for Google in that scenario. From a VMware point of view they will want to maintain that control plane and need to continue to satisfy customers in that space.”

However, added Gartner’s Leong: “Many customers do not want to change their existing hypervisor environments, and some customers have applications from small ISVs who only support VMware-based virtualisation, and thus need some VMware when they migrate to the cloud.”

Implications for the market

Now enterprise customers can choose to run Vsphere workloads on GCP, Azure and AWS. That means customers have more choice than ever, but will also have to make assessments as to the cost implications of each option and which workloads to run where if running a hybrid multi-cloud strategy.

Microsoft, however, recently moved to close a licensing loophole that allowed its customers to save money when running software on VMware in AWS, as reported by Business Insider, in a move that AWS CTO Werner Vogels branded a “bait and switch” on Twitter. Microsoft is also yet to open up its private cloud Azure Stack in a similar manner.

The last elephant in the room will be Red Hat now that it has completed its mega-merger with IBM and aims to become what CEO Ginni Rometty called at the time “the world’s number one hybrid cloud provider”.

Just last week IBM launched Cloud Paks, which aims to allow customers to run applications on all of the major public and private clouds.

“Part of what VMware are doing is very much trying to be that enabler of multicloud infrastructure in a hybrid context,” Nick McQuire said. “What is changing now, and this comes back to the point of the announcement, is that companies that are still heavily on-premise and VM-based are going to the cloud.”

Google has been heavily focused on the hybrid and multicloud story under Kurian, reflecting a broader market shift, with the announcement of Anthos a big step in that sense.

“Having Kurian in charge has laid out a clear path to meet customers where they are on their cloud journey and VMs are key part of that,” McQuire said. “Full integration with the VMware stack in GCP is something they would need to address, so I think to an extent this was a highly necessary step for Google to strike this deal.”

Customers

In terms of who this is for, Google Cloud is clearly looking to give enterprise customers fewer ways to discount it out of hand in favour of the broad offerings at rival vendors AWS and Azure.

By tightly integrating with VMware, customers that run highly virtualised environments now have a clearer path to consumer GCP services. From VMware’s perspective this allows it to continue offering as broad a service as possible.

“Our partnership with Google Cloud has always been about addressing customers’ needs, and we’re excited to extend the partnership to enable our mutual customers to run VMware workloads on VMware Cloud Foundation in Google Cloud Platform,” Poonen said as part of Kurian’s blog post.

Google Cloud wouldn’t specify who these customers were when asked by Computerworld, but did earmark the retail sector as one that showed an interest in this partnership. Kurian also directly mentioned customers running SAP and Oracle applications in virtualised environments from VMware as key considerations when making this deal.

Some major shared global customers also include Airbus, which uses VMware for desktop virtualisation and Google Cloud Platform in its defence and space arm, as well as global bank HSBC, which is a VMware and Google Cloud customer.