Coming Soon: Salesforce.com with Amazon S3 Storage

Jon 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?