Earlier today, I sat in on a keynote presentation at Salesforce.com’s analyst event in New York City. CEO Marc Benioff and other Salesforce execs went over the earlier news that companies can now track Twitter conversations inside Salesforce. Naturally, I Twittered my notes (reproduced below). Salesforce is basically implementing Track (the ability to search and monitor conversations by keyword and topic) inside Salesforce.com in a way that hopefully Twitter will make possible for all of its users.
But the data point I found most interesting had nothing to do with Twitter. Salesforce talked about its own back-end infrastructure and revealed that all of Salesforce.com runs on only 1bout 1,000 servers. And that is mirrored, so it is really only 500. Think about that for a minute. Salesforce has more than 55,000 enterprise customers, 1.5 million individual subscribers, 30 million lines of third-party code, and hundreds of terabytes of data all running on 1,000 machines. Amazon’s Web Services, in comparison, runs on about 100,000 machines I am told by someone with knowledge of Amazon’s server infrastructure.
