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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
Salesforce President Keith Block said during the company's earnings call on Wednesday that he has a "great meeting of the minds" with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos over the cloud business.
And he said that Salesforce plans to expand its use of Amazon's public cloud service.
"We are definitely exploring ways so we can use AWS more aggressively with Salesforce," Block said. "Jeff and I have a lot of very exciting ideas on what the next steps are."
Block disclosed that Salesforce is now running part of its Marketing Cloud software on AWS, in addition to its Heroku platform and parts of the new IoT Cloud software. In return, Amazon has rolled out Salesforce's software as a company-wide platform last quarter, he said.
Alexa's cameo
Salesforce still runs the majority of its workload on its own private datacenters. But Block's comments Wednesday suggest it may offload more of its operations to Amazon - bolstering Amazon's fast-growing, and increasingly important, cloud business.
Throughout the call Block had nothing but glowing remarks for AWS, saying it's the most "sophisticated" and "robust" public cloud service in the market. He even gave a nod to Alexa, the voice recognition software that powers Amazon's hit product Echo, saying, "Okay, Alexa, would you take the next question."
Salesforce isn't the only big-name company to use AWS: Netflix and Capital One are AWS customers. Even Uber is reported to be contemplating a move to the public cloud, taking bids from the cloud arms of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
It's still unclear how far Salesforce is planning to go with AWS. Salesforce has a lot of clients in regulation-heavy industries, so it's unlikely they'll go all-out on AWS anytime soon. But Block sure sounds like he's ready to work a lot more closely with AWS.
"We're very happy to be so tightly aligned with Amazon and AWS...you'll continue to see more announcements between Salesforce and Amazon and you will see our partnership and strategic alliance with them continue to grow and develop," he said.
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through hispersonal investment company Bezos Expeditions.