Salesforce is migrating more than 200,000 systems from CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, building on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to streamline IT operations and enhance customer experiences

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, is standardizing its global hybrid cloud infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Helping the company to drive business transformation at scale to meet customer demand, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a more flexible and consistent foundation for security-enhanced hybrid cloud deployments. The platform enables Salesforce to free up valuable developer resources while at the same time consolidating IT systems, all helping to generate better business outcomes for customers.

Salesforce is a customer-centric, innovation-driven provider of cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems, using a software-as-service model to support a robust customer base. Over the years, Salesforce has continued to grow and evolve its offerings to incorporate breakthrough technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), automated self-service tools and real-time data insights to support customer business needs. In doing so, Salesforce relies on a massive IT footprint that spans hundreds of thousands of systems running in traditional datacenter environments and in Hyperforce, Salesforce’s platform architecture designed for the public cloud. The company’s rapid growth and innovation adoption also led to a heterogeneous operating system environment, including CentOS Linux 7, which required additional maintenance and management from Salesforce’s skilled infrastructure teams.

Now, Salesforce is standardizing the full scope of its hybrid cloud infrastructure on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With this migration, Salesforce intends to gain even more efficiency in its IT operations, enhancing developer productivity and fueling greater innovation across the customer experience. Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers the necessary stability for modern IT workloads and enterprise-grade hybrid cloud deployments, enabling organizations to run applications anywhere while providing ease of management across on-premises and cloud environments.

By migrating its global infrastructure from CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Salesforce seeks to realize key benefits such as:

● Optimized performance and efficiency across various hardware and software architectures, including ARM, which enables Salesforce engineering teams to more easily adopt breakthrough technologies without incurring new infrastructure demands.

● Meeting customers where they are with a hardened platform that can drive more consistent innovation across the hybrid cloud, from the datacenter to public clouds to the edge, with the capacity to support unique customer use cases regardless of location or scale.

● Improved system security measures with Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s layered approach to IT environment security, including support for many of the latest cryptographic and secure computing innovations.

● Enhanced customer support experiences through Red Hat’s award-winning support team, enabling Salesforce engineering to focus on delivering customer value without being bogged down in the minutiae of managing an operating system at cloud-scale.

Salesforce has a longstanding history of collaboration with Red Hat and IBM Consulting to support customers with reliable cloud infrastructure and architecture for optimized CRM performance. With today’s announcement, Salesforce is expanding upon relationships with Red Hat and IBM to modernize its cloud infrastructure for evolving customer needs.

Supporting Quotes

Matt Hicks, president and chief executive officer, Red Hat

“As pioneers and leaders in our respective fields, Red Hat and Salesforce have a deep understanding and appreciation for constant transformation and relentless innovation in driving improved customer success. This collaboration highlights this shared commitment, as Salesforce can remain laser-focused on the customer experience, while Red Hat brings its decades of expertise in enterprise open source technologies and hybrid cloud infrastructure in support of their efforts to address dynamic customer needs.”

Srini Tallapragada, president and chief engineering officer, Salesforce

“Customer centricity lies at the heart of everything we do. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, our global IT operations will innovate faster than ever to deliver the reliable, scalable experiences our customers demand.”

Additional Resources

● Learn more about Salesforce’s migration journey

● Explore the benefits of migrating from CentOS Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are based on the company’s current assumptions regarding future business and financial performance. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statement in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

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