Salesforce Partners With HP For ‘Superpod’ Dedicated Service

Salesforce has announced a partnership with HP to offer its products as a dedicated instance running on HP’s converged infrastructure products, shunning the likes of Cisco.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff sits on the board of Cisco, which has a major converged infrastructure play with UCS,  but HP was still the chosen one.

The Salesforce Superpod offering, announced today during the Dreamforce 2013 conference in San Francisco, will be available “for an additional fee” for the cloud giant’s largest customers. The pair will jointly develop and market the Superpods, whilst HP will be the first customer using the power-focused product.

Salesforce loves HP

Salesforce now relies on two of the biggest IT suppliers for its back-end infrastructure, having announced a lengthy deal with former enemy Oracle to use its hardware to deliver most of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) portfolio.

Meg Whitman, CEO of HP, was on stage with Salesforce’s chief Marc Benioff this morning to talk about the Superpod’s supposed benefits.

“There are times when customers want a single instance, whether from healthcare, or the financial industry,” she said. “I think it is going to grow [the Salesforce business], our business, and most importantly benefit our customers.”

The Superpod architecture is no different to its other products, from a software point of view, but should have speed, power and reliability benefits over the standard service.

Larger customers had been asking for a dedicated service, according to co-founder of the SaaS giant Parker Harris, and Salesforce wanted to give them that choice.

“It has the same capabilities as all of our infrastructure. From a customer perspective it’s no different, other than it’s engineered with amazing technology from HP,” he added.

The company has not revealed the cost, release date nor who can take advantage of the Superpods.

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