Salesforce ramps up fast and reliable private enterprise connectivity

IDC estimates that cloud software revenue will increase to $151.6 billion by 2020, growing nearly three times faster than the entire software market. This means that about half of all new business software purchases will be service-enabled software.

This growth represents a significant gain in SaaS and PaaS revenues. However, some of the challenges in this rapidly expanding cloud software market involve maintaining high performance and application reliability, while meeting regulatory and compliance concerns typically associated with industries such as government and healthcare.

Enterprises expecting these capabilities from IaaS providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure are now demanding the same from SaaS and PaaS providers.

This is where cloud service providers, such as Salesforce, look toward direct, private interconnection to gain the performance and reliability needed to meet customer and industry regulatory and compliance demands. Salesforce is the world's leading customer relationship management (CRM) provider.

Together with Equinix, the company recently announced direct, private access to the Salesforce platform via Equinix Cloud Exchange in markets across North America and Europe, in a move to best address enterprise customer requirements. Salesforce Express Connect is currently available in Washington, D.C, Silicon Valley and Frankfurt.

Salesforce Express Connect enables enterprises to access Salesforce applications directly, instead of going over the public internet.

The Cloud Exchange gives organizations the throughput and control they require to expand the addressable market of cloud services. The guaranteed bandwidth, consistent low-latency and "internet-free path" also unlocks the number and type of workloads that businesses are willing to put into the cloud.

Enterprises are looking for the ability to leverage direct connectivity to the Salesforce platform for more sensitive workloads and to comply with both regulatory and compliance rules.

And in some cases, they want this private access in addition to public internet access to Salesforce, which means managed cloud service providers must offer both options to enterprise customers.

By eliminating the high cost and complexity of setting up direct peering relationships with multiple cloud providers, the Cloud Exchange and its automated, near real-time provisioning make it easier and faster for Salesforce customers to enable managed peering with not only Salesforce, but also with other SaaS, PaaS and IaaS cloud services and networks.

According to Salesforce's Alan Lindsay, vice president, industry and cloud alliances, "Customers, partners and employees increasingly need to connect and collaborate across geographies to drive productivity and innovation. Equinix is accelerating this shift for its customers with the addition of Salesforce to the Equinix ecosystem.

Salesforce customers can also have their application instances hosted in one of several Equinix data centers in multiple geographic locations with 99.99999% uptime for redundancy and high availability.

Article by Bill Long, Equinix blog network