Digital Realty continued to expand its direct access to enterprise cloud services, today adding direct private access to Salesforce via its Service Exchange in 15 metros worldwide. The data center and colo operator already provides access to Oracle and IBM Cloud services.
Salesforce has been "the most requested SaaS application from day one," Digital Realty Trust Inc. CTO Chris Sharp told Light Reading on Monday. "We have been looking at this for some time now and there are a few other SaaS applications we are looking at to bring into the fold as well."
The advantage for Digital Realty's colocation and interconnection customers is reduced complexity -- they can more easily add access to the popular Salesforce Express Connect, alongside other services and cloud on-ramps they already buy from Digital Realty. And for Digital Realty, this lets them compete more effectively with archrival Equinix, which has been offering an on-ramp to SFEC for more than a year now.
"Our abilities for multiple megawatts -- those medium to larger enterprises don't want to have to run a multi-tier architecture, and they want the full benefit out of these interconnection services to their large footprint deployments. So that's where we have been winning a lot of [customers] that need to the right product type, be it scale or colo, and still want to have this private secure on interconnection model," Sharp says.
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For his larger customers, the conversations today are "not if, but how many cloud applications are you betting your business on" and Salesforce is almost always on that list, he adds. Many customers want to leverage newer Salesforce technologies such as Einstein, their AI platform, directly.
Layer 3 access to Salesforce is available immediately in Amsterdam; Ashburn, Va.; Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Frankfurt, Dallas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Phoenix, Portland, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle.
It was important to make sure access was available globally because, without broad access, the customers again face issues of complexity in determining where the direct access to Salesforce is available and where it isn't, and that once again introduces complexity customers don't want, Sharp said. He adds that Digital Realty continues to explore pushing more things closer to customers, to reduce latency for their applications.
— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading