Today, the Salesforce1 World Tour comes to Paris. Many large companies host their own events to connect with customers, publicize what they’re up to and make big announcements. However, Salesforce’s events, including their stalwart Dreamforce and now Salesforce1World Tour, are well-known to stand-out from the pack. This year, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff is joining the ‘World Tour’ and will be the headliner at today’s Paris event.
Leading up to the event, both Benioff and his VP of Applications and Platforms and previous founder of the Saleforce-acquired InStranet , Alexandre Dayon, have sat down with Le Figaro and BFM (respectively) to talk about the importance of Europe overall and France more specifically to their strategy (incidentally, Benioff is clearly bullish on France’s entrepreneurial scene, heralding France as a great country to start a business).
Salesforce has already been extremely active in France having acquired two French companies in recent years (i.e. InStranet, Entropysoft) opened a research center in Paris, inaugurated their new French headquarters in Paris this month, and launched a research center focused on non-structured Internet content in Grenoble. According to both Benioff and Dayon, they plan to go even further by following-on to the launch of their first European data-center in the UK with a second European datacenter launch in France in 2015. As a result of their plan to double-down on Europe, they expect to create 400 new Europe-based jobs this year alone.
While Salesforce is cognizant of the increasing demand by many of their European customers to have their data remain on European soil, Dayon stresses that this is merely a factor in why they’ve decided to expand their datacenter footprint in Europe. Their principal driver is, in fact, their desire to remain in close proximity to their customers and, undoubtedly, to be well-positioned to be at the forefront of the European businesses’ wide-scale transition to the cloud.
If you’d still like to attend today’s event, you can register here.