Salesforce to finally land in Australia

Salesforce will finally bring some of its popular cloud services to Australia with local hosting, after six years of promising to open an Australian data centre.

Salesforce CFO Mark Hawkins today announced at the Salesforce World Tour event in Sydney that the company has partnered with Amazon Web Services to host its Intelligence Customer Success Platform in AWS' Sydney data centres.

That will include offering its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, and Analytics Cloud products via AWS Sydney infrastructure to local users.

The company's customers have long been waiting for a local Salesforce region to arrive.

In 2011 Salesforce chief Marc Benioff said it was a matter of "when, not if" it would build a local data centre.

The company continued to make the pledge over the following six years - and as recently as June last year - with no action.

In that time Salesforce was outpaced by AWS, Microsoft, and Rackspace, among others, to launch Australian infrastructure. Salesforce continued to serve Australian customers from Japan or other Asian regions.

However, today Hawkins said Salesforce had heard the demands from customers for local hosting loud and clear.

The company also noted APAC was its fastest-growing region in its most recent quarter.

"We talk to customers and we always listen. You're our true north when it comes to providing solutions," Hawkins said.

But despite the fanfare, the Sydney region won't be made generally available to Salesforce customers until the second half of the year, the company said.

Salesforce also didn't elaborate on its decision to partner with AWS rather than build - as it has long promised - its own infrastructure.