Salesforce.com, the cloud-based customer relationship management service provider, is to open a new European data centre in the UK to support its fast expansion across the continent.
The company claims that sales across Europe are currently growing by 38 per cent and the move will also help Salesforce to claim compliance with European Union data protection laws, enabling the company to pursue public-sector contracts in the EU.
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"Europe is one of our fastest growing regions in the world right now," said Salesforce chief operating officer George Hu, speaking at the company's Salesforce London customer conference. "In the last year, we had 38 per cent growth across Europe - both in the UK and across the continent."
It will also support a drive into the Middle East and Africa.
George Hu continued: "We have just signed an agreement with NTT Europe to deliver this data centre in the UK. We have broken ground on it and it will be opening as early as 2014."
The data centre will be the sixth worldwide for Salesforce. It is being built by NTT Europe - part of the giant NTT telecoms group - in Slough, Berkshire and will open in 2014. Such a move has been on the cards for some five years, but Salesforce has always deferred claiming that it does not need to extend its data centre estate into Europe.
Robin Balen, managing director of NTT Europe's Wholesale Data Centre Business, claimed that the data centre will be 100 per cent powered by renewable energy, but did not say how the company would achieve that.
Salesforce's European chairman, Steve Garnett, indicated that the location had been influenced by a shift in attitude by the UK government towards cloud, especially with the advent of the G-Cloud framework, which Salesforce joined in 2012.
However, its progress into the European public sector has been hampered by a lack of data centre facilities in Europe, which it needs for many activities in order to comply with the EU Data Protection Directive.
