Coming Soon: Salesforce.com with Amazon S3 Storage
- By Isabel Wang on January 25, 2007
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FacebookJon Price from ISPCON is worried about running out of space on his Salesforce.com account. According to Salesforce's edition comparison data sheet (PDF), customers with "professional" and "enterprise" subscriptions only get 1 GB of total storage, or 20 MB per user, whichever is greater. Even "unlimited" accounts include just 120 MB per seat.
But Jon wants his CRM system to be a rich repository of data on customer interactions, with "hundreds of proposals, ppt slides, scanned documents, copies of contracts and whatnot all jammed into that same database and assigned to activities, opportunities and customer records." 120MB certainly won't accommodate this level of usage. I'll bet people will want to save screencasts and product videos as well before long.
The obvious answer, Jon says, is Amazon's S3. Why couldn't Salesforce use Amazon's web services API to build an applet for saving customer data to S3? Better yet, why not offer their own pay-per-GB storage using the servers they maintain at Rackspace?
(I didn't know that Salesforce has servers at Rackspace, but this sounds like yet another reason why Rackspace should develop an on-demand storage platform?)
Adam Gross, Salesforce's SVP of Developer Marketing, told Jon that Salesforce/S3 integration IS possible, but it doesn't seem like they have any plans to build a solution. I wouldn't be surprised to see a third party mashup in the near future. I totally agree with Jon about the tremendous PR buzz it would generate: on-demand apps + on-demand storage, what could be better? (Probably not leasing storage capacity by the server and installing/managing one's own software?)
PS - Jon also uses Webmail.us for email, and he has a Typepad-powered blog. It seems his choices agree with IDC's survey finding that IT users prefer having someone else maintain their applications?
One of the Web hosting industry's longest-standing citizens, Isabel Wang is also a high-tech enthusiast. Through her WHIR blog, she examines the impact emerging Web technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of hosting consumers. Isabel has been in the web hosting ... (Read full bio)
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Comment by Anonymous on Thursday, January 25, 2007
SALESFORCE.COM DOES SELL EXTRA STORAGE FOR CUSTOMERS THAT NEED IT. THEY DO SO IN EITHER 50mb OR 500mb PACKS. THERE IS NO LIMIT TO HOW MUCH STORAGE A CLIENT CAN BUY.
ALSO, 95% OF SALESFORCE.COM'S CUSTOMERS NEVER ACTUALLY GET NEAR THEIR 1GB STORAGE LIMIT.
Comment by Anonymous on Thursday, January 25, 2007
Hi OnD, I couldn't find prices on Saleforce's website, but I'm guessing even the 50 MB pack costs more than Amazon's $0.15 monthly fee for 1 GB? As for storage usage, could you tell me where you found the 95% stat? Thanks!!
Comment by Anonymous on Thursday, January 25, 2007
Salesforce.com does not colo at Rackspace.
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 26, 2007
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the clarification! But I feel like a more pressing issue for you guys to address is Jon Price's perception that you're focused on "big targets a la Cisco" and would gladly see smaller customers "go (open source) away".
http://ispcon.blogs.com/ispcon/2007/01/s3_and_salesfor.html
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 26, 2007
AFAIK, salesforce is entirely at Equinix San Jose and Ashburn, VA.
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 26, 2007
What a coincidence, our team here ate DreamFactory happens to be building this product: S3 document management for salesforce....
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, January 26, 2007
No way! That's awesome - looking forward to hearing about its rollout!!
Comment by Anonymous on Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Yeah,i can't wait for the rollout;this is really exciting.
Comment by Anonymous on Friday, June 20, 2008
I just came across this thread, and wanted to let
Comment by Anonymous on Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Why to wait for a coming solution? It is already t
Comment by Edwin Fu on Monday, March 09, 2009
Great article. As a former salesforce.com consulting shop, our customers complained time-and-time again around this issue. At roughly 50-120mb per license (with an aggregate of 1GB/org) and a limit of 50mb per file, you're hitting the limits at roughly 2 ppts and a few docs.
In a former life as a salesforce.com employee, I endlessly debated this question with product managers and was met with the response that SFDC was an CRM application company vs. a storage company. I always thought that this wasn't right.
So when we got a chance to develop a solution for one of our customers, we really saw a market potential for something like this and the idea evolved. Today, we have a file collaboration service native to the force.com platform where we provide:
- collaborative features
- 5GB per license (aggregates at the company level)
- uploads of up to 256GB
- SAS 70 Type II Storage
- Geographic Distribution in APAC, Americas, and EMEA
We're currently in private beta, but granting some invites from our website. If anyone's interested, sign-up at www.cloudize.net or email me.
Edwin FuProduct Manager, Cloudizeefu AT cloudize DOT net
Comment by Anonymous on Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The first comment ("95% OF SALESFORCE.COM'S CUSTOMERS NEVER ACTUALLY GET NEAR THEIR 1GB STORAGE LIMIT") misses the point, though I also think it's wrong. Even if it were true, SFDC could grow their customer base by providing additional storage space at a reasonable cost. Once you reach 100K+ Leads and Contacts in SFDC, it becomes too expensive to continue to pay their high data storage fees.
Being first doesn't make you the best. Unless SFDC finds a way to lower their data storage costs, they're going to lose their market position.
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