TEL AVIV, Sept 10 (Reuters) - Cloud software firm

Salesforce ( CRM ) said on Tuesday its Hyperforce cloud platform

was now available in Israel, which will allow sensitive

government and companies' data to stay local.

The platform, two years in the making, will initially run on

Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure and possibly later on

Google Cloud Platform, company officials said.

Itai Margalit, head of sales at Salesforce ( CRM ) in Israel, said

having a cloud platform would benefit government entities and

those firms "that are regulated and need to comply with privacy

laws ... and cannot go out of the boundaries of Israel."

The cloud platform in Israel is the 17th globally for

Salesforce ( CRM ). Until now, data from its thousands of companies in

Israel were storing data at its Frankfurt facility.

"The Israeli government approved our Frankfurt data center,

for government use," Udi Shvekey, the lead architect for

Hyperforce, said on the sidelines of a press conference in Tel

Aviv.

Salesforce ( CRM ), which has three sites in Israel and 750

employees after acquiring a half dozen Israeli startups, said

all its customers would be soon migrated to the local cloud

platform.

Salesforce ( CRM ) has also been heavily investing in artificial

intelligence (AI) for months and integrating the technology into

the workflows of its large suite of products to drive revenue

and margins.

Margalit said its Israel R&D center was one of the three

strategic sites for Salesforce ( CRM ) along with the United States and

India.

"Here we are doing a lot of development on the cutting edge

technologies with AI," he said.