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Salesforce Is All About Data

Ian Varley
Jun 24 - 2 min read

If you know anything about Salesforce, you probably think of it as a “customer company” — a popular Customer Relationship Management system, or a platform for business apps delivered in the cloud. That’s all true — our mission as a company is to make our customers successful with their customers. And we do it damn well.

Technical readers will realize, however, that there’s no magic in running a cloud service: it’s just a lot of hard engineering work. Under the covers, “the cloud” isn’t delivered with pixie dust and jargon, it’s delivered by understanding and tackling some of the most challenging distributed engineering problems in computer science.

At Salesforce, the center of that challenge is data.

We have every kind of data you can imagine: relational data, file data, streaming data, high-scale data, search index data, analytical data, operational metrics and logs, queues, caches, map/reduce jobs, machine learning pipelines … you name it. And our customers expect all of that to be as reliable and predictable as the tides, day after day, at incredible scale. It’s a tall order, to put it lightly.

To give you a taste of how our world-class data engineering teams do it, we’ve collected a few pieces of writing from here on Medium (and around the web):

This week, we’ll be attending SIGMOD ’16 (which is across the street from our office, nudge nudge). You going? Come chat with us about the central role that data plays at Salesforce, and the exciting things coming next.

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