Salesforce.com Revamps CRM Platform, Signs HP Deal
Salesforce.com announced Salesforce1, its new sales, marketing and service cloud-based platform, at the company's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. Salesforce.com operates the largest software as a service (SaaS) cloud platform and this new addition aims to focus on social features, while making its apps and those of its large ecosystem of ISVs suitable for mobile devices.
Salesforce1 is also architected for the notion of cloud-connected devices and introduces a new application infrastructure designed to enable developers to build apps with social interfaces that are designed for mobility. The company said the new platform has 10 times more APIs and services.
The new community oriented Salesforce1 is available to all customers of the Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Platform. The Salesforce Mobile and Salesforce Admin apps are available in the Apple App Store and on Google Play.
"It's the world's first CRM platform for everyone -- for developers, for ISVs, for admins, for end-users and, most of all, for your customers," Benioff said on the company's third quarter earnings call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. "So you can go social, mobile, cloud and get connected."
Also at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com and Hewlett Packard inked a deal to let customers build virtual instances of the Salesforce CRM platform. Using HP's "Converged Infrastructure" of servers, storage and network gear, the companies will collectively build the Salesforce "Superpod."
"The Salesforce Superpod will allow individual customers to have a dedicated instance in the Salesforce multi-tenant cloud," Benioff said in a statement announcing the deal.
However Salesforce will host the Superpods in its own datacenters and not HP's. In fact, the Superpods are identical to the existing 15 pods in Salesforce datacenters used to host the company's CRM platform, InformationWeek reported. The key difference is that Salesforce will equip the Superpods with HP infrastructure.
Furthermore Salesforce is only offering the Superpods to the largest of enterprises, the InformationWeek report pointed out, adding that it's intended for those who have governance and security requirements. "For the vast majority of customers, this is not appropriate," he reportedly said. "But there are customers who want to go to another level."
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/21/2013 at 8:19 AM