Appirio -- Attachments In Salesforce.com

Certainly one of the most popular on-demand software applications of all time is Salesforce.com. Their "no installation" approach to software changed the CRM industry, and one of the features that made them even more popular was the ability for third parties to provide even more value via add-in applications.

One of these third party applications is Appirio, a Salesforce.com partner. Today they released Appirio Cloud Storage for Salesforce.com, which enables users of Salesforce to store more large documents and files via Salesforce.com's on-line user interface. Files stored in Appirio are safely tucked away using Amazon S3, which of course is a highly resilient and durable data store.

One of the most interesting aspects of Appirio's software from a technology point of view is that they are essentially creating a "mash up" of two clouds: Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services. As I just mentioned, Salesforce.com users are able to simply upload case files, documents, contracts, log files, videos, etc. directly from the environment that they work in every day. Because Appirio supports files up to 1 GB in size, Salesforce users are no longer restricted by the default 5 MB upload limit. This eliminates the "where did I put it?" effect that so many organizations have, created by separate repositories for files--often behind a corporate firewall that road warriors can't access.

Behind the scenes Appirio is using Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 for storage. Which means, in the case of storage, that there is no upper limit on how many files can be stored in Appirio's environment.

There's another perspective on this over at the Appirio blog.

-- Mike

Comments

[cheapskate]

wow, i can't believe how much they are charging for this.

5GB/month storage on S3 will cost you 75 *cents* a month (not including bandwidth which might add ~$20 a month)

5GB/month storage on salesforce.com with Appirio is $200/month, or $100/month if you pay for a whole year.

to look at it another way, for $200/month you could store 5GB on s3 for a month and download all 5GB 37 times every single day of that month!