Dreamforce 2024 | Matt Yanchyshyn | AWS

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Matt Yanchyshyn

VP, AWS Marketplace & Partner Services

AWS

Three insights you might have missed from Dreamforce ’24

Organizations in today’s digital landscape rely on interconnected systems, meaning integrating platforms and unifying operations is critical. As AI becomes a bigger part of modern systems, technologies such as Salesforce Agentforce AI are drawn more in focus.Practitioners, meanwhile, have proven to be the biggest benefactors and influencers of data-driven markets. With its leading role in automation integrations, Salesforce Inc. has had its eye on the broader enterprise AI market. The company’s plans around automation and for Salesforce Agentforce AI were a central focus of the recent Dreamforce event.Christophe Bertrand and John Furrier of theCUBE talk during Dreamforce 2024

Data-Driven AI: The strategic collaboration Between AWS and Salesforce Data Cloud

For better decision-making with artificial intelligence, data must be at the core, positioning solutions — such as Salesforce Data Cloud — to most effectively unlock deeper insights and predictive analytics.Since making informed decisions based on customer behavioral trends and patterns is crucial, Salesforce Data Cloud is playing a key role by enhancing the effectiveness of AI solutions, according to Matt Yanchyshyn (pictured), vice president of AWS Marketplace and partner services at Amazon Web Services Inc.AWS’ Matt Yanchyshyn talks to theCUBE about the relevance of the Salesforce Data Cloud in this day and age.“We’re seeing a lot of interest in Data Cloud these days,” Yanchyshyn said

play_circle_outline Boosting Procurement Speed: Automation, APIs, and Private Offers Streamlining Contract-based Buying

play_circle_outline Channel partner growth in Marketplace

play_circle_outline Using Salesforce platform for Partner Central and AI innovations

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Matt Yanchyshyn | AWS

Matt Yanchyshyn

VP, AWS Marketplace & Partner Services AWS

search

>> Hello and welcome back to Dreamforce 2024 Live from the NYSE Studios that we've built just up the street from Moscone, really digging into what's going on in the ecosystem around Salesforce and Dreamforce this week. And joined by one of their biggest ecosystem partners in AWS. We have Matt Yanchyshyn, who really is driving a lot as the VP of Marketplace and Partner Services with AWS. How are you doing, Matt?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> I'm doing great. I'm excited to be here this week and, yeah, it's a lot of fun, a lot of activity.

>> Yeah. I, again, was going through and looking at what was going on. You have an exciting talk later today where you're going to have one of your joint customers on stage with you. What is it that really brings the two companies together and how does Marketplace play a role in that?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, well, like you mentioned, we're going to have that session with SiriusXM later today, and when I think back about a year, year and a half ago when I was working with Lenore, who I'll be in the keynote with on Wednesday for the tech and media keynote, we were just getting started and just trying to imagine how we could improve procurement for our customers together. Fast-forward to today and I think it's exceeded both of our expectations. In fact, I know it's exceeded both of our expectations. We have tons of customers just telling us that they're using Marketplace with Salesforce to streamline procurement, to optimize spend management costs, and really just make things smoother when it comes to buying Salesforce products.

>> Yeah, because, I mean, under the hood, Salesforce is actually deployed on AWS, and when you start to look at it, it makes a lot of sense for it to be part of Marketplace and to be joined together at that point. How have you seen companies when they're going to Marketplace and engaging, is it one of these things that they look at it because they get the holistic bill and they're able to go through and understand that better?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things. First of all, not only is it Salesforce with Hyperforce, we're excited how it's deployed on AWS, but even internally we use Salesforce, and that's at the root of the partnership. I use the Experience Cloud to build my Partner Central product. Our internal CRM is built on Sales Cloud, so we're big consumers and so we're partners in the true sense. But yeah, when it comes to why customers use Marketplace to procure not just Salesforce, but anything, yeah, I mean, a lot of it started with getting on the AWS bill. Anyone who's worked in procurement or just in buying software and enterprise will know that vendor onboarding can be tough. And that problem is largely solved when you're procuring through Marketplace because the partner products you're buying actually shows up alongside your AWS services on the bill. So that's a big part of it. But that was just the beginning. And I think really in the last few years what has really helped to propel Marketplace but help customers is private offers. So we still have a very healthy, what we call, self-service business where you can show up and try before you buy, request a demo, buy it without ever talking to a human. But what's really propelled the business and what is important for the Salesforce relationship is this ability to more seamlessly actually do traditional contract-based buying, what we call private offers, and streamline that. Make the legal cycle shorter, make it easier to just move through all those stages of standard software procurement in the enterprise. And that's where the big value is, because, again, if you've ever bought an important piece of software like Salesforce in a company, you'll know that it can take time. Lawyers get involved, procurement teams staying involved, and we shrink each of those stages by using Marketplace. And that's what customers love. It's the speed of procurement.

>> Private offers, and being able to use EDP and things of that nature make a lot of sense. And having been at Amazon, I actually know about that. I used Sales Cloud as well while I was there. I think part of it is also Slack. While I was there, we got Slack, which was another Salesforce product.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> In fact, we have Slack Connect now. And so we're using Slack internally with our own systems to allow partners to connect with customers with AWS teams to facilitate those three-way discussions. So we're actually using Slack to really improve not just the partner experience, but the customer experience. Instead of having to pick up the phone and call a bunch of people, you can do that via Slack now.

>> Yeah, that's fantastic, I think the better you can do working back from the customer and understanding their needs so that both parties are in that transaction together. How has it been with Salesforce and how has the growth been with this business, in this part of the business with Salesforce?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, I mean, like I mentioned, rewind a year, we had what we thought at the time were pretty lofty ambitions and I know it's really exceeded both of our expectations. So not only is there a healthy pipeline, healthy deal volume, but just the size and frequency of the deals is amazing. But most importantly, we're just getting a lot of good customer feedback. Like with the Sirius example later today, customers are telling us, "Hey, this is actually the way we prefer to do business with both AWS and Salesforce." And that's really validating because we put a lot of work in on both sides of the company to make this happen and now it's becoming the new normal for our joint customers, which is nice to see.

>> Yeah, I think, again, anything that changes, it always takes a little time, but I think, again, if there's benefit on the other side, they go with you for the ride. Most customers do from that perspective. How have you seen the just plethora of Salesforce offers change over the last year as you've been engaged with them and how they're bringing that to Marketplace?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah. Well, you can actually buy all of Salesforce's products now in the marketplace. And I think a lot of people traditionally associate Salesforce with their CRM products, their sales cloud products, et cetera, but Data Cloud, we're seeing a lot of interest in Data Cloud these days. You mentioned Slack, Tableau, they have a whole suite. And actually on Data Cloud specifically, I think this week I'm spending a lot of time talking about AI, and as everyone knows, data is the root of AI. And so that part of the portfolio is where I'm personally probably the most interested and where we're seeing a lot of traction with Salesforce, with the Marketplace. How do I use Data cloud, procure data cloud, and then, most importantly, bring that data to bear in my AI applications?

>> We actually had MK on earlier.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Okay.

>> And so we were talking about Data Cloud and how it's actually procured and things of that nature. I think one of the interesting things is AWS was also part of the Agentforce announcement last Thursday as one of the premier partners, go-to-market partners for that. It would seem like that, that would also be a natural fit because there's so many AI enabled applications and, like you said, the data and the fact that they have connectors through their MuleSoft into Data Cloud and things of that. And I think you're both part of the Zero ETL Alliance as well.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> The Zero Copy, yeah.

>> Which helps immensely. How has that helped? Because, like you said, with private offer, that's more traditional selling where the sales folks or the channel or distribution is involved, and how has that helped when you look at just the breadth of what you can offer together so it's more of a solution sell versus just, "Hey, I'm buying this product and that product"?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, I mean, you said the right word. It's a loaded term, but solutions. These days, the buyer in the cloud actually is changing, just like we saw this rise of this whole generation who were used to buying applications on their phones, the App Store generation, and they're now often CIOs at major companies and they want that same type of immediacy and that ability to procure quickly even in their enterprise marketplaces, which is one big reason why AWS Marketplace has been so successful. But yeah, there's also the line of business buyer and really buyers who are looking for business case purchases, and those business case purchases almost always involve multiple partner products and AWS products in tandem. So that's why things like the Agentforce Network and the Zero Copy Network are so important because they allow customers more easily to combine multiple data sources, multiple applications even, and chain them together to make those applications. And that's really consistent with what I'm hearing from customers. They want to solve use cases, business cases, and that takes multiple products. So if we can help them procure those products quickly through Marketplace, use the data together through Zero Copy, for example, it's always better for the customer.

>> And, again, I think you just hit on an important part, which was the fact that it's not only just Amazon and Salesforce that's being sold as part of that, how has the ecosystem around that and the partner ecosystem also grown with what's in Marketplace?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, well, just look at the marketplace itself. I mean, we have over 20,000 listings now, and rewind maybe a year, year and a half ago when I was saying much lower numbers, the actual number of products in the marketplace is growing. But what I think is really interesting is, if you look over the last year, certain categories are growing particularly fast. Horizontal business applications of which Salesforce is a part is growing very quickly. It's one of our fastest growing product categories. But also increasingly industry products. I think this is interesting, and also Salesforce plays a role with Data Cloud and other products. We have whole industries coming online to the cloud, coming online to the marketplace, and they're bringing with them this huge long tail of ISVs who may not have traditionally been in the cloud or traditionally been in the marketplace. And that's fueling huge growth. So I expect to see this solution of combining multiple products to solve business cases trend. We're just starting. It's going to continue through the next few years.

>> I know from having been over there and been actually in the marketplace and put other products in the marketplace in my past, I think one of the things that it helps is also bringing together the sellers from both teams. And I would assume private offer is really key to that because you have both sides of the fence really getting involved in this. So you have involvement from AWS, you have involvement from Salesforce, and the partners all coming together in that private offer.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Ideally and what we're working towards is as little communication required as possible during that process. Because, again, speed is so important for customers. A really good example is what we launched with channel partners. You mentioned this, with distribution partners and channel partners. Increasingly, customers are buying through resellers and indirectly. And to do that, to authorize a reseller to sell your product to a customer used to be a whole bunch of phone calls. And now you can make just an API call. So I had a customer tell me the other day, it blew their mind. They said, "The ISV issued. The resell authorization to the channel partner. The channel partner sold it to the end customer. The customer bought it. They didn't talk to anybody." And I think that type of chaining of partners, in this case for channel, but it could be also multiple partners to solve a business case, that's the future. It's here now and it really contributes to that speed of procurement, again, that I keep talking about.

>> Yeah. Again, I think Amazon gets a bad rap for its channel partner-esque, but I think like you said, helping facilitate that through APIs and bringing the speed is actually changing that view I think from a lot of channel partners as well.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Oh, yeah. I was just at the Marketplace Seller Conference last week, and one thing I shared to the many channel partners in the room was that the channel is actually one of the fastest growing parts of Marketplace. So we think of SaaS, we think of traditional product categories, machine learning, obviously, AI is growing fast, but channel partners are growing incredibly. And I think it represents a big shift in the types of buyers showing up to marketplace, but also in just the relationships we have with distribution partners, the resellers, the managed service providers. They're some of our most successful and most important partners in Marketplace now.

>> Yeah, we've been seeing that with the managed service providers and how they're connecting up, because a lot of data is still actually on-prem or in some of these regional cloud type service providers. Are you seeing that these offers coming together are really facilitated and facilitating better relationships and deeper relationships with the private offers? Is that a big piece of that as well?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it comes down to, well, A, meeting the customer where they are. If customers want to buy through their incumbent channel partners because maybe they have to in some U.S. government cases, for example, or because they prefer, they have a good relationship with the channel partner, we should let them buy that way. And so it's meeting the customers where they are. But I also think it's about reach and acquiring new business. And a lot of ISVs who we work with, they want to go into new countries and into new territories, reach new customer segments, and that's really hard to do oftentimes. You can't just expand in a new country. That can be expensive. And so partnering with channel partners and with Marketplace together allows you to really grow your new business and increase customer reach. And so I think that's fueling a lot of the channel growth that we're seeing.

>> Yeah, I would assume so, because I think when you start to look, private offers is not necessarily new, but I think the speed at which you're able to do it is new.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah. We were the first cloud marketplace. We were lucky to be first movers there. We were the first ones to offer channel partner private offers and solution partner private offers. But we're just getting started. We're working increasingly with our Designated Seller of Record Program with distribution partners and, yeah, things like the resell authorization through APIs, we continue to innovate in the space so that whether you're buying direct and buying one of Salesforce's many products or you're buying through a reseller or you're buying through a distribution partner, that should be as fast in all cases. And that's really the goal, automation meeting, customers where they are, and embracing the channel.

>> And it would seem that, like you said, you are big users and consumers of Salesforce as the platform for enabling a lot of this as well, along with the stuff underneath the hood in Amazon and AWS.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah. Like I mentioned, we built our Partner Central, which is the primary service that over 2.5 million users use in a partner community to do business with AWS and our joint customers. That is largely built on Salesforce Experience Cloud. That's a clear manifestation of the way that we're leveraging Salesforce. And it also has features. I mentioned Slack earlier. So yeah, we're using Salesforce as an application development platform, obviously, Sales Cloud for our own field, and now it's wonderful that they're selling all their products through Marketplace.

>> What else is exciting about what you have coming up this week here at Dreamforce? XM, I love them. I'm a proud customer of them as well. What else is exciting that you're going to be talking about or you're excited to hear about this week?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> I'm really excited to talk about all the AI innovation because I think we've reached this point in certainly the generative AI revolution where we're starting to see a lot of really interesting production use cases. It's not just these experiments that a lot of people were talking about a year ago. And so I myself have my own production use cases. We're using a lot of AI with our own internal services for doing smart recommendations to our field, to auto validate our listings, to help our support teams knock down their support queue a lot faster with real results. So I'm excited to stand on stage with Lenore and in the customer conversations that are happening and to speak credibly about the production use cases of our customers, but also my own. And I think the customers are hungry to hear, how are you using Gen AI with Salesforce products and within your own products to actually fuel real results and have great answers this year? So that's validating and I'm excited to share.

>> Yeah, I can imagine. Because AI, like you said, knocking down support cases and, everybody, that's always a critical because that leads to better NPS and better net retention and all of that good stuff. So totally makes sense. So last thought, what is it people should know both on the end user side as well as the partner side about what's coming with, as you look towards Re-Invent, you don't have to give away what's going on at Re-Invent, but as you look towards Re-invent in a couple weeks, well, a couple months here, but what do you see out for that?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> I guess I'll call out three things. One is that we really doubled down over the last 18 months on improving the buyer experience and the end customer experience through Marketplace, and you're seeing a few of those features come out. You saw request a demo, request a private offer to give more flexibility to buyers. We quietly launched an updated marketplace website with vastly improved SEO and new product detail pages that just look a lot better and they work a lot better for customers. So the look and feel and ability to use Marketplace to attract new business and try before you buy, do that more effectively, we launched a lot this year, and that's a preview into investments that will continue through next year. The second is reducing procurement friction. One of the upsides of all these horizontal business apps and industry apps coming onto the marketplace is that we have these new customers, these new cohorts coming on, and they're huge multinational customers with massive procurement teams. And they mean business. Just having a purchase order is not enough. You need to integrate with their whole procurement workflow. So expect to see a lot around reducing procurement friction for customers. And the last is, can't forget the partners and the sellers. Customers always are paramount for both of us, but we launched our Partner Experience Transformation in partnership with Salesforce last year, and that was always just, we're on year one of a multi-year journey. And so you saw a lot of innovation like the Slack Connect dimension. There's a lot more to come when it comes to improving the partner experience and continuing to bring Marketplace and the former APN closer together. So we want Partner Central and AWS more broadly to be the best place, to continue to be the best place for partners to do business in the cloud, and I have a lot up my sleeve there.

>> Good. Awesome. We can't wait to hear what's going on. Keep in touch. I really appreciate you coming on, Matt. This has been great, and I think it's so important, the ecosystem and how AWS plays a big role with this, and I can't wait to see what happens with Agentforce and all of that as well as that populates up into your Marketplace there.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, I'm excited about everything that's going on at Dreamforce and looking forward to next year already. So thanks for having me.

>> Awesome. And thank you for watching this episode of Dreamforce 2024 from the NYSE. We'll be here the rest of the afternoon broadcasting live. Stay tuned.

Matt Yanchyshyn | AWS

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>> Hello and welcome back to Dreamforce 2024 Live from the NYSE Studios that we've built just up the street from Moscone, really digging into what's going on in the ecosystem around Salesforce and Dreamforce this week. And joined by one of their biggest ecosystem partners in AWS. We have Matt Yanchyshyn, who really is driving a lot as the VP of Marketplace and Partner Services with AWS. How are you doing, Matt?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> I'm doing great. I'm excited to be here this week and, yeah, it's a lot of fun, a lot of activity.

>> Yeah. I, again, was going through and looking at what was going on. You have an exciting talk later today where you're going to have one of your joint customers on stage with you. What is it that really brings the two companies together and how does Marketplace play a role in that?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, well, like you mentioned, we're going to have that session with SiriusXM later today, and when I think back about a year, year and a half ago when I was working with Lenore, who I'll be in the keynote with on Wednesday for the tech and media keynote, we were just getting started and just trying to imagine how we could improve procurement for our customers together. Fast-forward to today and I think it's exceeded both of our expectations. In fact, I know it's exceeded both of our expectations. We have tons of customers just telling us that they're using Marketplace with Salesforce to streamline procurement, to optimize spend management costs, and really just make things smoother when it comes to buying Salesforce products.

>> Yeah, because, I mean, under the hood, Salesforce is actually deployed on AWS, and when you start to look at it, it makes a lot of sense for it to be part of Marketplace and to be joined together at that point. How have you seen companies when they're going to Marketplace and engaging, is it one of these things that they look at it because they get the holistic bill and they're able to go through and understand that better?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things. First of all, not only is it Salesforce with Hyperforce, we're excited how it's deployed on AWS, but even internally we use Salesforce, and that's at the root of the partnership. I use the Experience Cloud to build my Partner Central product. Our internal CRM is built on Sales Cloud, so we're big consumers and so we're partners in the true sense. But yeah, when it comes to why customers use Marketplace to procure not just Salesforce, but anything, yeah, I mean, a lot of it started with getting on the AWS bill. Anyone who's worked in procurement or just in buying software and enterprise will know that vendor onboarding can be tough. And that problem is largely solved when you're procuring through Marketplace because the partner products you're buying actually shows up alongside your AWS services on the bill. So that's a big part of it. But that was just the beginning. And I think really in the last few years what has really helped to propel Marketplace but help customers is private offers. So we still have a very healthy, what we call, self-service business where you can show up and try before you buy, request a demo, buy it without ever talking to a human. But what's really propelled the business and what is important for the Salesforce relationship is this ability to more seamlessly actually do traditional contract-based buying, what we call private offers, and streamline that. Make the legal cycle shorter, make it easier to just move through all those stages of standard software procurement in the enterprise. And that's where the big value is, because, again, if you've ever bought an important piece of software like Salesforce in a company, you'll know that it can take time. Lawyers get involved, procurement teams staying involved, and we shrink each of those stages by using Marketplace. And that's what customers love. It's the speed of procurement.

>> Private offers, and being able to use EDP and things of that nature make a lot of sense. And having been at Amazon, I actually know about that. I used Sales Cloud as well while I was there. I think part of it is also Slack. While I was there, we got Slack, which was another Salesforce product.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> In fact, we have Slack Connect now. And so we're using Slack internally with our own systems to allow partners to connect with customers with AWS teams to facilitate those three-way discussions. So we're actually using Slack to really improve not just the partner experience, but the customer experience. Instead of having to pick up the phone and call a bunch of people, you can do that via Slack now.

>> Yeah, that's fantastic, I think the better you can do working back from the customer and understanding their needs so that both parties are in that transaction together. How has it been with Salesforce and how has the growth been with this business, in this part of the business with Salesforce?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, I mean, like I mentioned, rewind a year, we had what we thought at the time were pretty lofty ambitions and I know it's really exceeded both of our expectations. So not only is there a healthy pipeline, healthy deal volume, but just the size and frequency of the deals is amazing. But most importantly, we're just getting a lot of good customer feedback. Like with the Sirius example later today, customers are telling us, "Hey, this is actually the way we prefer to do business with both AWS and Salesforce." And that's really validating because we put a lot of work in on both sides of the company to make this happen and now it's becoming the new normal for our joint customers, which is nice to see.

>> Yeah, I think, again, anything that changes, it always takes a little time, but I think, again, if there's benefit on the other side, they go with you for the ride. Most customers do from that perspective. How have you seen the just plethora of Salesforce offers change over the last year as you've been engaged with them and how they're bringing that to Marketplace?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah. Well, you can actually buy all of Salesforce's products now in the marketplace. And I think a lot of people traditionally associate Salesforce with their CRM products, their sales cloud products, et cetera, but Data Cloud, we're seeing a lot of interest in Data Cloud these days. You mentioned Slack, Tableau, they have a whole suite. And actually on Data Cloud specifically, I think this week I'm spending a lot of time talking about AI, and as everyone knows, data is the root of AI. And so that part of the portfolio is where I'm personally probably the most interested and where we're seeing a lot of traction with Salesforce, with the Marketplace. How do I use Data cloud, procure data cloud, and then, most importantly, bring that data to bear in my AI applications?

>> We actually had MK on earlier.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Okay.

>> And so we were talking about Data Cloud and how it's actually procured and things of that nature. I think one of the interesting things is AWS was also part of the Agentforce announcement last Thursday as one of the premier partners, go-to-market partners for that. It would seem like that, that would also be a natural fit because there's so many AI enabled applications and, like you said, the data and the fact that they have connectors through their MuleSoft into Data Cloud and things of that. And I think you're both part of the Zero ETL Alliance as well.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> The Zero Copy, yeah.

>> Which helps immensely. How has that helped? Because, like you said, with private offer, that's more traditional selling where the sales folks or the channel or distribution is involved, and how has that helped when you look at just the breadth of what you can offer together so it's more of a solution sell versus just, "Hey, I'm buying this product and that product"?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, I mean, you said the right word. It's a loaded term, but solutions. These days, the buyer in the cloud actually is changing, just like we saw this rise of this whole generation who were used to buying applications on their phones, the App Store generation, and they're now often CIOs at major companies and they want that same type of immediacy and that ability to procure quickly even in their enterprise marketplaces, which is one big reason why AWS Marketplace has been so successful. But yeah, there's also the line of business buyer and really buyers who are looking for business case purchases, and those business case purchases almost always involve multiple partner products and AWS products in tandem. So that's why things like the Agentforce Network and the Zero Copy Network are so important because they allow customers more easily to combine multiple data sources, multiple applications even, and chain them together to make those applications. And that's really consistent with what I'm hearing from customers. They want to solve use cases, business cases, and that takes multiple products. So if we can help them procure those products quickly through Marketplace, use the data together through Zero Copy, for example, it's always better for the customer.

>> And, again, I think you just hit on an important part, which was the fact that it's not only just Amazon and Salesforce that's being sold as part of that, how has the ecosystem around that and the partner ecosystem also grown with what's in Marketplace?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, well, just look at the marketplace itself. I mean, we have over 20,000 listings now, and rewind maybe a year, year and a half ago when I was saying much lower numbers, the actual number of products in the marketplace is growing. But what I think is really interesting is, if you look over the last year, certain categories are growing particularly fast. Horizontal business applications of which Salesforce is a part is growing very quickly. It's one of our fastest growing product categories. But also increasingly industry products. I think this is interesting, and also Salesforce plays a role with Data Cloud and other products. We have whole industries coming online to the cloud, coming online to the marketplace, and they're bringing with them this huge long tail of ISVs who may not have traditionally been in the cloud or traditionally been in the marketplace. And that's fueling huge growth. So I expect to see this solution of combining multiple products to solve business cases trend. We're just starting. It's going to continue through the next few years.

>> I know from having been over there and been actually in the marketplace and put other products in the marketplace in my past, I think one of the things that it helps is also bringing together the sellers from both teams. And I would assume private offer is really key to that because you have both sides of the fence really getting involved in this. So you have involvement from AWS, you have involvement from Salesforce, and the partners all coming together in that private offer.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Ideally and what we're working towards is as little communication required as possible during that process. Because, again, speed is so important for customers. A really good example is what we launched with channel partners. You mentioned this, with distribution partners and channel partners. Increasingly, customers are buying through resellers and indirectly. And to do that, to authorize a reseller to sell your product to a customer used to be a whole bunch of phone calls. And now you can make just an API call. So I had a customer tell me the other day, it blew their mind. They said, "The ISV issued. The resell authorization to the channel partner. The channel partner sold it to the end customer. The customer bought it. They didn't talk to anybody." And I think that type of chaining of partners, in this case for channel, but it could be also multiple partners to solve a business case, that's the future. It's here now and it really contributes to that speed of procurement, again, that I keep talking about.

>> Yeah. Again, I think Amazon gets a bad rap for its channel partner-esque, but I think like you said, helping facilitate that through APIs and bringing the speed is actually changing that view I think from a lot of channel partners as well.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Oh, yeah. I was just at the Marketplace Seller Conference last week, and one thing I shared to the many channel partners in the room was that the channel is actually one of the fastest growing parts of Marketplace. So we think of SaaS, we think of traditional product categories, machine learning, obviously, AI is growing fast, but channel partners are growing incredibly. And I think it represents a big shift in the types of buyers showing up to marketplace, but also in just the relationships we have with distribution partners, the resellers, the managed service providers. They're some of our most successful and most important partners in Marketplace now.

>> Yeah, we've been seeing that with the managed service providers and how they're connecting up, because a lot of data is still actually on-prem or in some of these regional cloud type service providers. Are you seeing that these offers coming together are really facilitated and facilitating better relationships and deeper relationships with the private offers? Is that a big piece of that as well?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it comes down to, well, A, meeting the customer where they are. If customers want to buy through their incumbent channel partners because maybe they have to in some U.S. government cases, for example, or because they prefer, they have a good relationship with the channel partner, we should let them buy that way. And so it's meeting the customers where they are. But I also think it's about reach and acquiring new business. And a lot of ISVs who we work with, they want to go into new countries and into new territories, reach new customer segments, and that's really hard to do oftentimes. You can't just expand in a new country. That can be expensive. And so partnering with channel partners and with Marketplace together allows you to really grow your new business and increase customer reach. And so I think that's fueling a lot of the channel growth that we're seeing.

>> Yeah, I would assume so, because I think when you start to look, private offers is not necessarily new, but I think the speed at which you're able to do it is new.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah. We were the first cloud marketplace. We were lucky to be first movers there. We were the first ones to offer channel partner private offers and solution partner private offers. But we're just getting started. We're working increasingly with our Designated Seller of Record Program with distribution partners and, yeah, things like the resell authorization through APIs, we continue to innovate in the space so that whether you're buying direct and buying one of Salesforce's many products or you're buying through a reseller or you're buying through a distribution partner, that should be as fast in all cases. And that's really the goal, automation meeting, customers where they are, and embracing the channel.

>> And it would seem that, like you said, you are big users and consumers of Salesforce as the platform for enabling a lot of this as well, along with the stuff underneath the hood in Amazon and AWS.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah. Like I mentioned, we built our Partner Central, which is the primary service that over 2.5 million users use in a partner community to do business with AWS and our joint customers. That is largely built on Salesforce Experience Cloud. That's a clear manifestation of the way that we're leveraging Salesforce. And it also has features. I mentioned Slack earlier. So yeah, we're using Salesforce as an application development platform, obviously, Sales Cloud for our own field, and now it's wonderful that they're selling all their products through Marketplace.

>> What else is exciting about what you have coming up this week here at Dreamforce? XM, I love them. I'm a proud customer of them as well. What else is exciting that you're going to be talking about or you're excited to hear about this week?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> I'm really excited to talk about all the AI innovation because I think we've reached this point in certainly the generative AI revolution where we're starting to see a lot of really interesting production use cases. It's not just these experiments that a lot of people were talking about a year ago. And so I myself have my own production use cases. We're using a lot of AI with our own internal services for doing smart recommendations to our field, to auto validate our listings, to help our support teams knock down their support queue a lot faster with real results. So I'm excited to stand on stage with Lenore and in the customer conversations that are happening and to speak credibly about the production use cases of our customers, but also my own. And I think the customers are hungry to hear, how are you using Gen AI with Salesforce products and within your own products to actually fuel real results and have great answers this year? So that's validating and I'm excited to share.

>> Yeah, I can imagine. Because AI, like you said, knocking down support cases and, everybody, that's always a critical because that leads to better NPS and better net retention and all of that good stuff. So totally makes sense. So last thought, what is it people should know both on the end user side as well as the partner side about what's coming with, as you look towards Re-Invent, you don't have to give away what's going on at Re-Invent, but as you look towards Re-invent in a couple weeks, well, a couple months here, but what do you see out for that?

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> I guess I'll call out three things. One is that we really doubled down over the last 18 months on improving the buyer experience and the end customer experience through Marketplace, and you're seeing a few of those features come out. You saw request a demo, request a private offer to give more flexibility to buyers. We quietly launched an updated marketplace website with vastly improved SEO and new product detail pages that just look a lot better and they work a lot better for customers. So the look and feel and ability to use Marketplace to attract new business and try before you buy, do that more effectively, we launched a lot this year, and that's a preview into investments that will continue through next year. The second is reducing procurement friction. One of the upsides of all these horizontal business apps and industry apps coming onto the marketplace is that we have these new customers, these new cohorts coming on, and they're huge multinational customers with massive procurement teams. And they mean business. Just having a purchase order is not enough. You need to integrate with their whole procurement workflow. So expect to see a lot around reducing procurement friction for customers. And the last is, can't forget the partners and the sellers. Customers always are paramount for both of us, but we launched our Partner Experience Transformation in partnership with Salesforce last year, and that was always just, we're on year one of a multi-year journey. And so you saw a lot of innovation like the Slack Connect dimension. There's a lot more to come when it comes to improving the partner experience and continuing to bring Marketplace and the former APN closer together. So we want Partner Central and AWS more broadly to be the best place, to continue to be the best place for partners to do business in the cloud, and I have a lot up my sleeve there.

>> Good. Awesome. We can't wait to hear what's going on. Keep in touch. I really appreciate you coming on, Matt. This has been great, and I think it's so important, the ecosystem and how AWS plays a big role with this, and I can't wait to see what happens with Agentforce and all of that as well as that populates up into your Marketplace there.

Matt Yanchyshyn

>> Yeah, I'm excited about everything that's going on at Dreamforce and looking forward to next year already. So thanks for having me.

>> Awesome. And thank you for watching this episode of Dreamforce 2024 from the NYSE. We'll be here the rest of the afternoon broadcasting live. Stay tuned.