Salesforce.com Opens Singapore Facility

Salesforce.com (CRM) has brought its new Singapore data center online ahead of schedule, a move to accommodate strong adoption of Salesforce CRM applications and the Force.com platform across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. The company said today that its APAC customer base now tops 5,000 customers (out of 59,300 total).

The Singapore expansion, which was announced last year, was originally scheduled to go live before the end of fiscal 2010. The Singapore project includes a new Network Operations Centre (NOC) that enables 24x7, follow-the-sun monitoring of the company's data centres in North America and Singapore.

Salesforce.com’s operations run on about 1,000 servers, most of which are concentrated in a single West Coast data center, with customer data mirrored at an East Coast site. Both sites are hosted within data centers operated by Equinix, according to Salesforce.com, which described its data center operations in an SEC filing earlier this year.

Salesforce.com doesn't say where the Singapore facility is housed, but given the company's relationship with Equinix, it's worth noting that Equinix has several data centers in Singapore.

"Asia-Pacific is our fastest growing market, and there has never been a better time for enterprise cloud computing," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "Our new Singapore data center represents continued investment in our global real-time infrastructure to accelerate customer success with cloud computing worldwide."

"This significant development will add to the richness of Singapore's infocomm landscape, increasing the confidence of SMEs in using SaaS for business productivity and contributing to our Cloud Computing eco-system," said Andrew Khaw, Senior Director and Group Head, Industry Development, of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. "Singapore is in a strong position to support fast-growing international infocomm companies such as salesforce.com in delivering innovative web-based services to customers here and globally."

In its earnings report for the first quarter of fiscal 2010, salesforce.com reported 36 percent revenue growth in Asia Pacific compared to the same quarter a year prior, as customers continue to adopt enterprise cloud computing to run their businesses. The company's customers in the Asia-Pacific region include Acer, Amcor, Challenger Financial Services, Crocs, Ricoh, VSNL and Telecom New Zealand.

"CIOs and IT departments at Asia-Pacific enterprises recognize the innovation, time-to-value and ease-of-use that salesforce.com delivers with cloud computing," said Lindsey Armstrong, executive vice president of international enterprise sales, salesforce.com. " Enterprises are realizing that this is the era of cloud computing, and salesforce.com gives businesses the ability to harness the power of cloud computing to better their companies."