Salesforce debuts Zero Copy Partner Network to ease data integration

Streamlining third-party data connections

Dubbed the Zero Copy Partner Network, the new ecosystem brings together ISVs and SIs in an effort to get rid of the custom integrations and complex data pipelines previously required to integrate and move data from Salesforce to external data warehouses and vice versa. Carlson said zero-copy integration offers businesses a more efficient, secure, and user-friendly way to connect data to business applications compared with traditional ETL processes and data pipelines.

The traditional methods of accessing data from third-party systems require businesses to build and maintain the connection and reconcile data changes over time. Zero-copy integration means teams access data where it lives, through queries or by virtually accessing the file.

Salesforce pioneered zero-copy bidirectional integrations with Data Cloud via partnerships with Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Google Cloud’s BigQuery, and Snowflake. With today’s announcement, integrations with BigQuery and Snowflake are generally available. Carlson noted that integrations with Redshift and Databricks are still in pilot but will go live later this year.

“We’re expanding the network to include our ISV ecosystem, enabling them to build on top of those zero-copy connectors to offer enrichment datasets, SaaS applications, and business applications with zero-copy integration to the data that resides in their platforms,” he added. “We are also extending that to our SI ecosystem to make sure that all of the global SIs we work with are certified and ready to help our customers with this distributed zero-copy integration pattern.”

According to Carlson, the benefits of zero-copy integrations include:

• Accessing live external data without copying (no reverse ETL). Zero-copy integration means accessing live data where it lives. If the source data changes, it updates everywhere immediately.
• Acting on data from anywhere in the flow of work. The data becomes part of Salesforce’s metadata framework and can thus be used in multiple ways, including generating BI or AI insights, marketing segmentation or activation, or creating unified customer experiences. For instance, a Data Cloud-triggered flow could update an account manager in Slack when shipments in an external data lake are marked as delayed.
• Sharing Customer 360 insights back without data replication. Not only does zero-copy integration provide the ability to read data from data warehouses and data lakes, it also enables sharing insights back to those systems without data replication.
• Maintain governance and security. Zero-copy integration eliminates the need for manual data movement, preserving data lineage and enabling centralized control fat the data source.
• Ground generative AI. Zero-copy integrations can connect to unstructured data (like PDFs, call transcripts, and emails) in addition to structured data, making it possible to bring unified business data into any AI prompt.

Currently, Data Cloud leverages live SQL queries to access data from external data platforms via zero copy. Carlson said that makes sense for data warehouses that have a query interface, but Salesforce also plans to use Apache Iceberg to provide a new, low-latency way of virtualizing data in Data Cloud with direct file access at the storage level. When released, this will extend zero-copy data access to any open data lake or lakehouse that stores data in Iceberg or can provide Iceberg metadata for its table.