HP puts compute, storage, and networking in a single box so Salesforce.com customers can run private instances of its sales, service, and marketing clouds.
Salesforce.com announced a strategic partnership with HP on Monday so that it will bring financial services, healthcare organizations, government agencies, and other large, security-sensitive organizations an choice to run private instances of the Salesforce sales, service, and marketing clouds.
HP is contributing the hardware for all-in-one, appliance-style Salesforce Superpods in order to run in Salesforce.com datacenters but which are designed to offer large, demanding organizations their very own instance of Salesforce and, thus, a brand new level of control services impossible with a traditional instance from the vendor’s multi-tenant public cloud.
“The salesforce.com and HP partnership is a breakthrough in cloud computing,” Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, said in a statement. “The Salesforce Superpod will allow individual customers to have a dedicated instance inside the Salesforce multi-tenant cloud, powered by HP’s technology and entirely managed within salesforce.com’s world-class data centers.”
[ Want more at the big news from the Dreamforce event? Read Salesforce Debuts Mobilized Salesforce1 Platform. ]
Industry watchers have speculated that Salesforce would provide a personal-cloud option ever because it announced a strategic partnership with Oracle in June. Through that deal, Salesforce committed to using the Oracle database and middleware, software that undoubtedly provides crucial infrastructure inside the Salesforce Superpods. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and HP CEO Meg Whitman are set to speak about the partnership in additional detail on Tuesday in a keynote on the big Dreamforce event in San Francisco.
Given a standardized software stack and control over storage, compute, and networking capacity, CIOs at large corporations may be assured of meeting strict data-residency and knowledge-governance rules, and they might presumably have control over software updates, customizations, and integrations with systems running of their own datacenters.
What’s not clear yet is strictly how and when Salesforce will upgrade and update its software and what degree of control customers could have over changes to our surroundings. The Superpod is a half step toward the hybrid strategies offered by competitors Microsoft and Oracle whereby you could run their CRM software on-premises or in private or public clouds. SAP offers SaaS services separately from software which might be deployed on-premises or as managed services.
Salesforce has stopped wanting offering an on-premises deployment option. That’s an option that Microsoft specifically is successfully exploiting with its Microsoft Dynamics CRM offering.
“For each 100 CRM deals that we saw last year, about 43 went to Microsoft Dynamics and about 38 went to Salesforce,” Constellation Research analyst Ray Wang told InformationWeek when the Oracle-Salesforce partnership was anounced. “The explanation Dynamics beat out Salesforce is because there has been an on-premises option.”
Salesforce also announced its third-quarter results on Monday, reporting strong, 37 percent billings growth over a similar quarter last year and solid cashflow. The corporate reported revenue of $1.08 billion and cash flow of $138 million, exceeding Wall Street estimates. Salesforce is now forecasting fiscal year 2014 revenue of $4.05 billion to $4.06 billion, up 33 percent from last year and 2 ticks earlier than the prior guidance of $4.00 billion to $4.03 billion.
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