Salesforce Releases Zero Copy Partner Network For Bidirectional Integration With Data Cloud
Data Cloud with zero copy integration allows businesses to keep their data in its original location while integrating metadata.
Salesforce has announced the release of Zero Copy Partner Network, a global ecosystem of technology providers building bidirectional zero copy integrations with Salesforce Data Cloud. The company also announced new zero copy support for open data lakes and lakehouses utilising Apache Iceberg open table format and added zero copy support for ISV partners developing data kits to distribute data sets to Data Cloud customers.
The network features initial partners Amazon Web Services, Databricks, Google Cloud and Snowflake, and adds Microsoft, with the objective of giving enterprises a secure and cost-effective way to connect and take action on data, the company said.
Organisations today juggle multiple systems to manage their business, but only 28% of applications are connected, and over 80% of business leaders struggle with data fragmentation and data silos, research shows. The challenge lies within scattered data, making it difficult to consolidate, generate insights and feed it back into engagement systems.
According to Salesforce, Data Cloud with zero copy integration allows businesses to keep their data in its original location while integrating the metadata. It integrates enterprise data, structured and unstructured, into a unified view accessible within Salesforce. This allows teams to make data-driven decisions directly in their flow of work, create personalised customer interactions and establish a foundation for AI.
By unifying and cleansing data, AI models can also operate on accurate information. This can help unlock the full potential of large language models, with the aim of delivering faster, more cost-effective results.
According to Salesforce, teams can access data from where it resides through queries or by virtually accessing the file. When source data changes, it’s immediately updated everywhere. Once in Data Cloud, data is part of Salesforce’s metadata framework, and can be used in multiple ways, including generating business intelligence or AI insights, marketing segmentation or activation, creating unified customer experiences, and analytics via Tableau.
Sales agents, service reps and marketers can all see the same information, facilitating collaboration across departments and allowing them to take action on data and drive improved customer experiences.
Zero copy integration also allows enterprises to share insights back to systems, including harmonised and unified customer data along with AI and BI insights, without the need for data replication, Salesforce said.
The process also eliminates the need for manual data movement, and since data remains in its original location, lineage is preserved. Additionally, because zero copy integrations enable centralised access control, it simplifies security management and reduces risks.
By connecting to unstructured data like PDFs, call transcripts and emails, zero copy integrations make it quick to bring unified business data into AI prompts sent through the Einstein Trust Layer. This can enable enterprises to deploy generative AI across Salesforce applications without having to fine-tune an off-the-shelf LLM, the company said.