tldr; Salesforce wants a piece of this pie and ones like it in the future. Also, it needs a different name.

No argument: the biggest announcement from Dreamforce 2020 (for me) was Hyperforce (not Slack), which enables customers to deploy Salesforce on any public cloud. I know few details about how this actually technically works, so I’m getting outside of my lane by focusing instead on the strategic value of Hyperforce for Salesforce and the business value for customers. Caveat: I’m likely 94.2% wrong about everything below. Caveat #2: I’m making wild assumptions about what it is and how it’ll work; it’s likely this isn’t ready for “prime time” and is still being built.

First, let’s start with the obvious business benefits of Hyperforce:

Access the Salesforce Platform on a completely reimagined architecture that’s more powerful and scalable than ever.

Data Residency

Salesforce has had a Data Residency Option (DRO) for a while now. It’s one of the things Certified Technical Architects are tested to know (your project has a CTA, right?). But Salesforce subscribers don’t get much say about which region their data is hosted in. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all provide excellent tooling that allows customers to self-select region-based hosting (and mirroring). By deploying Salesforce to one of these clouds via Hyperforce, customers now gain more control here.

Data Security

Salesforce Shield is a wonderful feature, but it has many, many drawbacks. I’m betting that by deploying Salesforce on a public cloud, customers can rest assured knowing their data is encrypted-at-rest with their own keys, while not losing any of the features that come with enabling Shield.

Performance & Resiliency at Massive Scale

Salesforce’s answer for customers needing performance & resiliency at massive scale has been to assign them their own pod; this is not cheap. Hyperforce enables these customers to manage this themselves. I imagine it will also alleviate (but never completely mitigate) LDV and other high-volume considerations.

Strategic Value for Salesforce

While all of the above business benefits are fantastic and open new opportunities on their own, I think Hypeforce is more about Salesforce’s continued battle against Microsoft (and other cloud platforms). Microsoft is Salesforce’s primary competitor because they are the only company that offers both Platform- and Software-as-a-Service; this in my opinion is likely just one of the many reasons why Microsoft won the JEDI contract from the Department of Defense. That contract is $10 Biiiilliiion dollars!

I’m positive Salesforce would love to get a slice of that pie and future pies like it. But the award for this contract goes entirely to Microsoft and completely shuts the door to Salesforce. Now Salesforce may not have a place with JEDI today, but in the future Hyperforce enables Salesforce to re-open that door and tell the DoD (and any organization making similar moves) that their SaaS can run on any public PaaS-cloud.

Put simply: Hyperforce enables Saleforce to sidestep the “Salesforce vs Microsoft/Google/etc” argument and insteady say “why not both?”.

This feels similar to the 90’s and 00’s when Java was eating the world because one of its main value propositions was “multi-platform”. Applications built on Java could now market their software to more business and sidestep the platform battle. “Your business users are on Microsoft, but your engineers are on Unix? No problem, our app runs on both platforms.”

Drawback

While Hyperforce has exciting benefits for customers and Salesforce, there is one big drawback: Total Cost of Ownership.

The Hyperforce move is interesting. For the last 20 years, Salesforce has successfully marketed itself as the “No Software” company. The #1 reason I fell in love with their platform was that I didn’t have to manage any infrastructure. When I started consulting on this platform back in 2005, that was a big deal. The fact that I could stand up a CRM in 5 minutes without needing to procure hardware (or hosting), setup VMs, manage OSes and software, updates, etc, well… that blew my mind.

Hypeforce doesn’t mean this benefit goes completely away. Afterall, I imagine Salesforce will still be managing the top portion of that stack, and likely all the compatibility issues of multi-cloud. But Hypeforce will mean that an organization will now need to manage more infrastructure than they would with just a Salesforce pureplay. Given the benefits however, this TCO impact is likely well worth it.

And speaking of TCO, I haven’t found any information that indicates the price of the Hyperforce feature itself. This, I think will likely be one of the barriers to adoption for SMB-customers

… TBC

Naming

Ok, this is a nitpick… The “Hyperforce” name is shared with the Power Rangers franchise which suddenly makes Googling for anything “Hyperforce” more challenging and bizarre.

Slack

The Slack acquisition isn’t all that surprising. Again, the motivation here goes back to the Microsoft competition. Without Slack, Salesforce just doesn’t have an answer to MS Teams (Chatter has a different use) and given this “new normal” the world is in where collaboration apps have a lot business value, this acquisition was expected.

However, Slack coupled with Hyperforce, I think will now open a lot of new opportunities for Salesforce’s future growth in competing with MS.