Salesforce.com and HP are forming an alliance to create what they call a “Superpod,” which will provide customers with HP’s converged hardware to run on the SaaS provider’s infrastructure. HP CEO Meg Whitman will announce the news on stage tomorrow at Dreamforce with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The superpod converged infrastructure, designed by HP, is what IT calls a converged infrastructure. It runs compute, storage and networking all in one box as opposed to running across a distributed infrastructure such as with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The new offering is meant for very large companies that have extensive IT infrastructure that requires enterprise integrations and a level of compliance that can be guaranteed by having the SaaS environment all in one box.
For HP, the company can now package its expensive hardware with the Salesforce SaaS technology. And Salesforce gets a way to move deeper inside large corporations with the promise of a single, dedicated solution.
In a prepared statement, Whitman described a “new style of IT,” which combines HP’s hardware technology with Salesforce cloud services.
HP is banking on selling its converged infrastructure as a way to get deeper into the enterprise with what they have called a private cloud service. In this case, HP is bringing the IT to Salesforce, a move that demonstrates how Salesforce is changing to accommodate larger companies by partnering with legacy enterprise providers. Earlier this year, Salesforce inked a deal with Oracle to purchase the software giant’s converged database technology to run its SaaS offerings.
At the crux of this is Salesforce new stage of development, which leverages its platform and third-party ecosystem with technology that would normally be found in a corporate data center. For HP, the deal makes it more appealing as companies can access the services Salesforce offers through data center style, big box machines.
