Enhancing Data Foundations with Salesforce
Salesforce, a leader in customer relationship management (CRM) software, has announced significant partnerships that promise to reshape enterprise data strategies. These collaborations aim to unlock the potential of unified data for enhanced customer profiles and more capable models.
Salesforce Teams Up with Databricks
Salesforce’s proprietary Salesforce Data Cloud, known for aggregating data from various sources to create real-time unified customer profiles, is set to support bi-directional data sharing and access with Databricks’ data lakehouse platform. This partnership will enable joint customers to enrich their datasets and explore new use cases.
“Access to trusted, governed data is critical for every company, and the ability to combine that data with AI is now essential to remain competitive,” said Adam Conway, SVP of Products at Databricks.
The collaboration promises to deliver value by facilitating seamless data integration and enhancing data governance and security.
Snowflake’s Integration with Salesforce
Snowflake, a major player in the data industry, has also joined forces with Salesforce to connect its data cloud with Salesforce’s data platform. This partnership aims to simplify data sharing and eliminate the need for complex data engineering processes.
Salesforce’s “Bring Your Own Lake” (BYOL) integration ensures that unified data from different platforms appears as if it’s housed in a single location, while maintaining the highest levels of governance, security, and trust.
The Power of BYOL
BYOL integration offers two key capabilities: Data Sharing and Data Federation. Data Sharing allows users to access Salesforce data cloud information from Databricks or Snowflake, while Data Federation enables access to data from these platforms within the Salesforce data cloud.
This bi-directional data movement benefits joint users by enhancing customer profiles and enabling the use of AI/ML and deeper analysis for improved business outcomes. For example, combining Salesforce CRM data with market analysis can lead to smarter inventory management and marketing decisions.
Empowering Data Scientists and Developers
Databricks users will have the opportunity to move their models to the Salesforce data cloud, allowing them to apply AI models across the Customer 360 platform. This movement of models will be made possible through Salesforce’s Bring Your Own Model experience.
“Data scientists and developers want to use their preferred tools and ML frameworks to build models that can drive predictions across the Salesforce platform,” explained Adam Conway.
While the connectors for Databricks and Snowflake are still under development, they represent a significant step toward simplified data integration and enhanced data-driven decision-making.
