I came across this press release today from Salesforce.com on PR Newswireannouncing, “Salesforce.com Executives to Present at Upcoming Investor Events.” What caught my attention wasn’t what the article said; it was where I found it – The Computer Hardware section of the site. In my opinion, the only hardware offering that could make any difference to an SaaS product would be a WAN optimization appliance.
Which customers could benefit from such an appliance? A small- or midsized-business with a sales force of perhaps 10-15 people would likely not see the benefit of a dedicated Salesforce.com appliance. Even adding 3-5 customer service personnel to the access list would not tax an internet connection’s bandwidth too heavily at all. From an example provided by BrendanOC, a regular contributor to developerforce.com,
“Page Size = 120kilobits Users = 10, Seconds between page views = 120 (2 minutes) and page load time = 2 seconds :
120 * 10 / (120 + 2) = 9.83kbps of bandwidth.”
But multiply this now by 1,000 for an international business with 10,000 employees regularly accessing their data (and in large enterprise, this is a close-to-conservative number):
120 * 10,000 / (120 + 2) = 9836.06kbps of bandwidth.
In this example, this business essentially needs a 10Mbps internet connection just to support Salesforce.com. Now that you have pulled that data into the corporate network, on a transactional basis, and distributed it across slower WAN links, over IPSec using existing connections, etc. you have a CRM solution that is just not optimal for many large enterprises. And, this example is about two years old. We all know that bandwidth consumption by online services has done the exact opposite of shrink. Being able to host this solution internally, utilize caching, and take advantage of the compression already provided by Salesforce.com on much larger data sets would make it a much more attractive solution.
This is not a new idea. In this post on the Salesforce Customer Community, member ahs_rob says, “By offering the product on-site larger customers can offer much more content ‘on demand’ through SFDC…For companies like mine that already host websites and have Unix admins, Oracle DBA's, Network Support and Web Admins on staff it makes a lot of since (sic) to allow local hosting.”
But wait. We have content delivery networks. We have WAN optimization appliances. Enter Akamai, one of the more recognized CDNs; and Riverbed, well known for their WAN optimization technology. In an article posted on datacenterknowledge.com I read dated February 29 of this year, authored by John Rath, these two players are teaming up to bring SaaS optimization appliances and services to the large enterprise.
The product is called the Steelhead Cloud Accelerator. Steelhead WAN optimization products have been shown to accelerate application performance typically 5-50 times. Steelhead Cloud Accelerator is a subscription-based add-on to existing Steelhead deployments. This is important because it doesn’t require any modification to the SaaS provider’s infrastructure.
Says Rath, ”The joint Riverbed and Akamai solution is able to … take a path … that was in the teens of hops down to just one… Using Akamai’s Edge delivery platform and SureRoute to optimize … a connection … from Cambridge to Chicago that previously took numerous hops and 85 ms (it) would now take one hop and 25 ms.”
If I were Salesforce.com, I would be very interested in creating an appliance that does this specifically for optimization of my product to make it much more attractive to the large global enterprise. I would offer a dedicated, out-of-the-box solution, instead of giving customers time to shop CRM solutions that they can utilize more efficiently with their new SaaS optimization hardware.
At the very least, I would team up with Akamai and Riverbed and create a cost-incentivized offer which would serve to improve close rates and reduce time-to-close for all three solution providers’ prospects. I would accelerate my entry into this market with incentives for resellers to offer and close these deals.
I believe the presenters are going to address one of these very two solutions at their upcoming investor events. But I am also curious what you think, reader. What are your thoughts as to why this press release would have been distributed under the Computer Hardware section of PR Newswire? Do you envision a dedicated Salesforce-branded appliance, an offering which includes major partner products, or could they just be announcing a reseller program with benefits for including WAN-optimization hardware and let their resellers do all the work?
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