Salesforce expands on-premises cloud platform in Israel By Reuters

By Steven Scheer

TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Cloud software firm Salesforce (NYSE: ) said on Tuesday that its Hyperforce cloud platform is now available in Israel, which will allow sensitive government and corporate data to remain local.

The platform, which will be developed over two years, will initially run on Amazon (NASDAQ: ) Web Services (AWS) infrastructure and eventually Google (NASDAQ: ) Cloud Platform, company officials said.

Itai Margalit, head of sales at Salesforce in Israel, said having a cloud platform would benefit government entities and those firms “that are regulated and have to comply with privacy laws … and cannot go outside Israel’s borders.”

Israel’s cloud platform is Salesforce’s 17th globally. Until now, data from thousands of companies in Israel stored data at its Frankfurt facility.

“The Israeli government has approved our data center in Frankfurt for government use,” Udi Shvekey, chief architect of Hyperforce, said on the sidelines of a press conference in Tel Aviv.

Salesforce, which has three sites in Israel and 750 employees after acquiring half a dozen Israeli startups, said all of its customers will soon be migrated to the local cloud platform.

Salesforce has also invested heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) for months and integrated the technology into the workflows of its large suite of products to drive revenue and margins.

Margalit said its research and development center in Israel is one of three strategic sites for Salesforce, along with the United States and India.

“We’re doing a lot of cutting-edge AI technology development here,” he said.