One of my recent project is related to salesforce , and its quite a bold move for me to choose an On-Demand model but luckily everything went right for me and so far the implementation is quite smooth. I have had a chat with their technical consultant to understand more about salesforce and from there, i believe that the following might be the reasons why salesforce is still not very popular in Asia:
- Asia need a Salesforce’s data centre. Currently, all salesforce’s data centre are located at US and i believe to attract customer in Asia, a data centre in Asia region is a must.
- Lower pricing is required. Salesforce is indeed a powerful service (software) but with their current pricing structure, it’s still a bit too high for Asia market.
- More open platforms are needed. Appexchange is a very good move, but the bad point is that it’s too commercialized. it might be good to make it open source.
Just my 2 cent about salesforce.
Good insight on how Asia feels. With respect to Appexchange, I don’t think they’d open the platform up more. I recently wrote an article at http://www.saasblogs.com/2007/01/11/saas-ecosystems-are-they-valuable-and-to-who/ that explains what value they have in the platform. Opening it could defeat that value.
Also, they will be using a proprietary language named Apex, so the “openness” might not work because of that angle also.