Zendesk Announces New Open CRM Platform, Zendesk Sunshine, Powered by Amazon Web Services

By PRNewswire On Nov 14, 2018

Zendesk Sunshine, Built Entirely on AWS, Brings the Power of Connecting and Accessing Any Customer Data to the Cloud

Zendesk, Inc.announced that Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) powers the infrastructure behind its new CRM platform, Zendesk Sunshine. Built on AWS, Sunshine allows businesses to connect and understand all their customer data, wherever it lives, and gives their developers the ability to build and deploy customer apps and services faster.

By building on AWS, the security, scalability, and reliability of AWS is built into the core of Sunshine, making the CRM platform more modern, flexible, and open than traditional platforms. Businesses can now gain the benefits of the cloud for quickly and easily moving data between Sunshine and their systems and applications.

By leveraging AWS, Sunshine gives businesses the tools to bring all of their customer data to where they build and run both their digital products and internal services — in the cloud.

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“Most of our customers are already running their businesses on, or considering a move to, AWS,” said Adrian McDermott, President of Products, Zendesk. “By working with AWS, Zendesk can give companies the ability to integrate and connect data from various sources to understand their customers better and personalize their journey. At the same time, with AWS powering the Sunshine CRM platform, developers have the freedom and control to build modern applications using the tools they already know and trust.”

“Zendesk’s growing relationship with AWS is fueled by a shared commitment to improve the customer experience,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Business Development, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are happy to support Zendesk as they help businesses leverage the flexibility, agility, and scalability of AWS, making it easy for customers to build application services with their CRM, combine their Zendesk data, and bring machine intelligence to the contact center.”

As part of this relationship, Zendesk plans to release a number of solutions and connectors to AWS to help developers and IT professionals access their data simply and easily. In addition to a Zendesk Marketplace solution with Amazon Connect, Sunshine will connect with various AWS services, such as Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VCP) AWS PrivateLink.

Businesses will be able to stream real-time events from Sunshine into their Amazon Kinesis Data Streams or Amazon S3, to easily connect data from departments within the company that have traditionally been siloed. They will also be able to use additional AWS services such as Amazon Redshift to effortlessly access both raw and transformed customer data for enhanced reporting and analytics.

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Feeding the data into AWS Machine Learning (ML) services like Amazon SageMaker can help businesses find patterns, perform advanced classification, and analyze sentiment, among other use cases.

AWS PrivateLink will create a direct, secure connection between AWS and Zendesk. Threat exposure is reduced by using a private AWS network connection, which routes traffic flowing between Zendesk and AWS services on an AWS network connection rather than the public Internet. Companies will be able to use their AWS PrivateLink-powered Zendesk endpoints to create an end-to-end view of their customers with simplified data storage and analytics.

Zendesk also announced an enhanced go-to-market offering with Amazon Connect, AWS’s cloud-based contact center service. A readily integrated solution using Amazon Connect and Zendesk is now available on both the Zendesk Marketplace and the AWS Solution Space. The Zendesk collaboration with Amazon Connect provides direct access to the Amazon Connect platform inside a Zendesk Support account.

For joint Zendesk and AWS customer Box, Inc. this collaboration unlocks new understanding about their business. “With AWS and Zendesk, we can easily bring our unique data into Zendesk to better understand our customers,” said Tim Smith, Vice President, Customer Success Services, Box, Inc.