Salesforce preps new data center in S'pore
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Salesforce.com is setting up a new data center in Singapore--its Asia-Pacific headquarters--to cater to the increase in its international customer base.
The facility, the company's first outside of North America, is expected to begin operations by year's end, said a Salesforce.com statement Monday. Salesforce has two existing data centers in the United States--one each in the East Coast and West Coast.
The new data center will host various SaaS applications as well as Force.com, Salesforce's platform-as-a-service.
Salesforce will also establish a network operations center (NOC) in the Singapore facility as part of 24/7 monitoring of the data centers in the two geographies. The company said it plans to invest in additional headcount and facilities to support the operations of the NOC here, but did not specify the level of increase in staffing.
"The decision to build our first data center outside of the U.S. is clear evidence that companies globally are abandoning the failed client-server software model and are looking for a new model that allows them to focus on innovation as opposed to infrastructure," Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, said in the statement.
Benioff added: "The explosive growth that we are experiencing in [the] Asia-Pacific, combined with a highly technically-literate and multilingual talent pool make Singapore the perfect location for our first data center outside of the U.S."
The company reported that its clientele in the Asia-Pacific region has doubled over the last 12 months. Based on its showing for Q1 ended Apr. 30, 2008, revenues from the region grew 94 percent year-on-year, and constitute about 10 percent of the overall revenues.
Globally, its customer base grew in the past year by over 11,000 to 43,600 companies.