Undoubtedly the rise of the cloud over the past few years has created tremendous dislocations within the IT sector. Outsourcing hardware and infrastructure needs started with moving equipment into data centers, took on a life of its won and ended with the rise of companies who had never been in the "hardware business" before.
Players like Amazon (AWS) and Google (GCP) who were never a factor as a provider of the technical backbone for corporations are now firmly entrenched in a lot of organizations. Microsoft, who was always present through their software solutions is now battling it out with everyone else as a cloud provider (Azure).
Then there are the established players who have built their own cloud to support their operations.
Perhaps no company has been more aggressive in developing its cloud than Salesforce. Their entire business has been built to be cloud centric from the start...and one can argue that the cloud made their business possible.
For CEO's and CIO's at companies operating their own cloud the question of whether one of the big 3 players in the field (AWS, AZURE , GCP) might do a better job than their own Internal Data Centers always gets deliberated.
The cost / benefit analysis is rather difficult in many situations. Not only does the company stand to loose certain functionality, it also has to consider the reputational effect when a technology company operating its own cloud effectively concedes defeat and moves its cloud to one of the big 3.
Yet, this is exactly what happened at Salesforce. Salesforce has chosen Amazon's AWS to power most of their core services. (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud , Analytics Cloud)
It is a rather stunning announcement. Salesforce who has been on the forefront of running perhaps the single most successful cloud business there is decided to move a significant portion of its cloud to a company which was barely in the business of operating a cloud service 10 years ago. (AWS was started in 2006)
Undoubtedly this is an event which will ring the bells at a lot of corporations who operate their won cloud. If the preeminent cloud centric business decides to outsource their cloud to AWS - what justification can be found by other companies to continue operating their own cloud ?
Salesforce might have been early ..but it just rang the exit bell for pretty much every company to close up their own cloud.