Salesforce: UK datacentre, Amazon-free Heroku coming

When Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff visited London for the company's annual Cloudforce conference back in 2012, he promised it would set up a UK datacentre by 2012.

Now, it's the 2012, and Cloudforce has rolled around once more. Only this year, there's no Benioff, and there's still no datacentre.

The company's still planning on opening a datacentre on UK soil, however, according to its EVP of technology Parker Harris.

"We're still very committed to it," Harris told a press Q&A at the event. No surprise there perhaps - one way to circumvent organisations', and particularly government's, concerns over data sovereignity is to offer them the chance to keep their data in Blighty.

Salesforce is still working on choosing a datacentre provider, and is now down to the last two.

"Once we've selected a final provider we'll be announcing an initial date [for the datacentre's launch]," Harris added. And, one day, theoretically that datacentre could even have a version of Heroku running on it.

According to Harris, while Salesforce has no plans to move its platform as a service product from its current Amazon home, it's working on creating a version that will run on its own datacentres.

But don't hold your breath - it won't be going live any time soon. "It's early days on the engineering front," the VP said.

Salesforce has no plans to start offering its own infrastructure as a service, and rather the homegrown Heroku will be "a light version for internal use".

Posted by Jo Best