Zendesk’s CRM platform Sunshine built entirely on AWS

Zendesk has launched the new customer relationship management (CRM) platform Sunshine, which is built entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition to enabling companies to interconnect data from any system, the platform gives developers access to open-source resources on AWS.

It’s time to move away from CRM platforms that think they’re the center of the universe and lock you into an outdated view of the world. We built Sunshine to understand the different dimensions of customers and their data, while giving developers the freedom to build the way they want in the public cloud,” said Mikkel Svane, founder and CEO of Zendesk in a response to ZDnet.

Private cloud implementations

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider specializes in customer service software, worth half a billion dollars, and claims to have been providing a solution to more than 125,000 paying customers since its inception ten years ago. The fast-growing company hopes to achieve a turnover of 1 billion dollars in 2020.

Even though that’s still a lot less compared to another major CRM player, Salesforce, which is aiming for a turnover of more than $13 billion in 2019. Just like Zendesk, Salesforce works closely with AWS and is even the preferred supplier in the field of infrastructure.

Something that the CEO of Zendesk realizes all too well: It is difficult to distinguish yourself when you are building solutions that are based on the same private cloud implementations. With the rise of AWS and Microsoft Azure, CIOs want to combine the technology of SaaS vendors and cloud vendors in one room.

New features

Zendesk would have provided the new Sunshine platform with a number of features, such as profiles, where customers from multiple applications are displayed in one overview and events, which makes it possible to create a timeline of all of a customer’s activities, such as customer service interactions, website visits, purchase transactions or shipping history.

In addition, users can use the custom objects tool to store any customer information as owned products or leased equipment.

In addition to the launch of Sunshine, at the same time Zendesk also launched a new automated sales tool called Zendesk Sell. According to the company, this tool would make the sales pipeline more transparent for sales teams and would enable companies to integrate support and sales data on the Sunshine platform. In addition, the SaaS supplier also made its data analysis tool, Zendesk Explore, publicly available.

Plenty of product launches in 2018

The launch of the new CRM platform Sunshine, Zendesk Sell and Zendesk Explore are the next in a long line of product launches that Zendesk is planning for the market this year.

In June, for example, during its partner event in London, the company launched a number of new tools for large companies to make customer service more efficient on a large scale.