Zendesk Brings 'Sunshine' - A Flexible CRM on AWS

Zendesk, Inc. (NYSE: ZEN) introduced Zendesk Sunshine, its open and flexible CRM platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). These expansions include new partnerships and integrations that will make it easier to connect siloed data and deliver deep customer insight to advance proactive customer experiences.

Zendesk also announced it acquired Smooch, a platform connecting businesses with customers to power more personalized and human conversations. The acquisition marks Zendesk's next step in delivering the best omnichannel experiences by connecting conversations between businesses and customers on any messaging channel--from websites and mobile apps to the world's leading messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

With Sunshine, businesses are able to connect and understand all customer data, wherever it lives, to build the best customer experiences. Sunshine is built for developers entirely on open standards with the security, scalability, and reliability of AWS at its core. With new integrations from companies including Narvar and Domo, Sunshine will begin offering new, powerful capabilities with tailored offerings across industries such as manufacturing and retail.

“Launching the open, flexible, CRM platform Sunshine, marked a significant milestone for us as we help companies get a deeper and more holistic view of their customers,” said Adrian McDermott, president of products, Zendesk. “Our new partnerships enable companies to build and deploy apps faster with Sunshine. This flexibility is key to creating experiences that customers want today.”

System integrators deliver on scale and operational efficiency  

As mid to large-size enterprises embark on digital transformation journeys, they often look to trusted IT advisors and integration partners to identify and understand new technologies that will help them not only scale, but also realize operational efficiencies. Zendesk is working with a range of system integrators (SIs) to help companies design, build and deploy Sunshine within complex cloud architectures.

A prime example is ClearScale, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, committed to building a Zendesk practice and leveraging its talented team of engineers and developers to deploy Sunshine solutions.

“Our partnership with Zendesk to broaden the capabilities of the Sunshine CRM platform is a perfect fit,” said Pavel Pragin, CEO of ClearScale. “Our expertise as an Amazon Web Services Premier Partner combined with Zendesk’s decision to tightly integrate Sunshine with AWS gives Zendesk customers virtually endless integration possibilities. This strategic partnership increases the ability for Zendesk to efficiently solve new complex issues with their customers and offer even more native features in the Sunshine ecosystem. We are delighted to be contributing to such a well-designed platform.”

Partner program advances Sunshine adoption across industries

Zendesk's technology alliances program and system integration partnerships provide tailored offerings to meet the needs of its customer base across critical verticals and use cases, including e-commerce, retail, manufacturing, IoT, and incident management. With Sunshine, customers can get up and running faster with fewer developer resources. These partnerships allow customers to leverage open APIs and create best of breed solutions with the ability to easily integrate other applications versus being locked into a closed system.

Additional partners including Qualtrics, Okta, PagerDuty, Atlassian Opsgenie, Zaius, Envoy, and Magento (an Adobe company) are committed to building Sunshine integrations in collaboration with Zendesk in the near future. These partners will join companies such as Pendo, Segment, Stella Connect, and Oomnitza, that currently build on Sunshine.

Narvar, a software company delivering post purchase experiences for retailers around the world, can help companies holistically manage customer experiences within Zendesk by connecting data about order details, shipment status and returns, as well as proactively address customer requests, decreasing response time and improving customer trust.

"We’re always looking for ways to drive operational efficiencies for commerce companies in service of simplifying the customer experience, whether on our own platform or through partnerships across the ecosystem,” said Amit Sharma, Founder & CEO, Narvar. “We know customer service is a critical piece of that experience, and integrating with Zendesk Sunshine helps meet the needs of both support teams and the consumers they serve.”

“This integration with Narvar and Zendesk Sunshine will allow our teams to better engage with our customers by having more visibility into each customer’s experience,” said Joe Megibow, CEO, Purple. “We strive to put our customers at the center of all we do, and are thrilled to continue to find new solutions that enable world-class service across the touchpoints in their journey.”

Domo, a cloud-based operating system that allows entire businesses to be run through phones, partners with Zendesk and AWS to enable companies to manage their IoT solutions in more impactful and proactive ways. End users receive a better, proactive service experience, and companies are able to reduce the cost of service.

“The beauty of connecting the Domo IoT cloud with AWS IoT Core and Zendesk Sunshine is the ability to receive real-time alerts coming in from devices anywhere across the world. Through this network of end-to-end data and device management, the Domo platform enables customer insight into individual connected devices, while dramatically reducing the time to resolve issues,” said Jay Heglar, Chief Strategy Officer at Domo. “For example, SharkNinja’s robot cleaning systems individually report back data and any issue that arises immediately alerts the AWS IoT Core and Sunshine systems to proactively create a fix request.”

The combination of these new partnerships and integrations for Sunshine will allow companies to easily anticipate customer needs and better engage with them throughout their experience.