Thursday 29 July 2010
Along with its two North American data centres, the company has launched a new facility in Singapore, which includes a new data centre as well as a network operations centre. The new Singapore facility allows the company to meet the service demands of its rapidly growing international customer base as well as extend the capacity, redundancy and scalability of its infrastructure,” the company said. Supporting the data centre infrastructure will be a new NOC headquartered in Singapore. The NOC enables 24×7, follow-the-sun monitoring of the company’s data centres in North America and Singapore. The company has more than 59,300 customers of all sizes, industries and geographies in its customer base as of 30 April 2009.
According to salesforce.com’s earnings report for the first quarter of fiscal 2010, the company registered 36% revenue growth in the Asia Pacific compared to the same period a year earlier. Its customers in the region now numbered more than 5,000 and include AAPT, Acer, Amcor, CGU Insurance, Challenger Financial Services, Crocs, Datacraft, Flight Centre, Hang Seng Bank, Mizuho Private Wealth Management, Ottagi, Pacnet, Ramco, Ricoh, SPH Search, VSNL and Telecom New Zealand. SaaS is moving beyond its roots in customer relationship management (CRM) into every area of the enterprise, including platforms for application development,” said Dane Anderson, CEO of Springboard Research.
Delivering an application as a pre-installed, pre-configured virtual application appliance with zero OS component shrinks install, set-up, and configure time to minutes. Yes, even large German ERP applications. Zero install’s effect of reducing POC duration by 20% can go to straight cost savings or to increased time spent actually working with the client and application. It can go to more POCs conducted a year per SE. In all scenarios, it goes to increased revenue. For example, they may sell back office manufacturing applications to the likes of the automobile industry. Fun, huh? Well, in North America, the ones that are using the cloud for their POCs have revenue up 5-6% compared to last year. The others? They are all down for the comparable period.”
Even more reason to run POCs in the cloud and it’s good for marriages. “Honey, I’m going to run down to the ball bearing factory to check on the POC. I know first-hand how hard it is to start a business, create a new product from a blank sheet of paper, create a new category that Gartner eventually buys into, raise money, But I can not imagine how hard it is to sell ERP to manufacturers that sell into the auto industry right now. That has got to be tough to the 10th power.
