Five years later, Salesforce is still promising an Australian datacentre

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blog Software as a Service giant dispatched its chief operating officer Keith Block (pictured, below) to Australia this week to Australia with the usual mission: Press the flesh with the major accounts, check up on the troops, and conduct select briefings with friendly media. Delimiter’s not on the list, but the Financial Review is, and wangled this fascinating nugget of insight out of Block (we recommend you click here for the full article):

“Mr Block declined to comment on the size of the Salesforce’s increased investment in Australia, but said it would manifest itself in areas such as real estate, hiring staff and data centre infrastructure.”

The reason this paragraph is so fascinating is that Salesforce has been promising Australian customers for many years that it would start delivering some of its popular cloud offerings from a local datacentre for many years. Take this article yours truly published in May 2011, for example.

block

At the time, Salesforce chief executive told The Australian newspaper that a local datacentre was a matter of “when, not if”.

Since that time, two things have happened. Firstly, Salesforce has not delivered on its 2011 promise. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Rackspace and others have launched their own Australian infrastructure, but Salesforce has consistently refused to serve Australian customers from an Australian datacentre. Instead, typically we get Japan or another Asian country.

The second thing is that, with a couple of notable exceptions, Salesforce has failed to follow its cloud compatriots in making any headway in sensitive markets such as Australia’s public sector, which typically requires data to be stored on-shore. Coincidence? I think not.

I’ve only got one thing to say to Block, with respect to his claim this week that Salesforce is going to be construction local infrastructure. Given that the past five years of promises have amounted to nothing, I would ask the Salesforce chief operation officer to put his money where his mouth is. If Salesforce is truly planning to deploy infrastructure in Australia, let’s see some action.

Prove it ;)

Image credit: Salesforce