Salesforce.com announced its intention to build a data centre in Singapore – its first outside North America. It will also establish a Network Operations Centre here to enhance the monitoring of the company’s global data operations.

The decision to develop its facilities in Singapore reflects the robust growth of the company’s Asia Pacific business – 94% year on year growth, contributing approximately 10% of Salesforce.com’s total quarterly revenue in the period ending April 30.

It certainly looks as if the cloud computing model is gaining traction in Asia.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company Salesforce.com’s latest release (Spring ‘08) will add Content Management and Collaboration features to its bag of tools. Salesforce.com also list 50 new features in its core CRM solution.

Many of these new features apparently started as ideas on the company’s own IdeaExchange forum.Salesforce Content is an interesting addition to the suite that uses social media concepts such as tagging, subscriptions and recommendations to allow users to manage unstructured content within the Salesforce environment.

Other recent networking concepts have been deployed within the Salesforce Ideas module to facilitate the management of communications and user feedback.It certainly is encouraging to see Salesforce.com taking the lead in turning popular innovations from the social networking sphere into tangible business oriented solutions.

Steve Russell expects 2008 to be a bumper year for the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model in Asia – not surprising given that Russell is the President of leading on-demand CRM software vendor Salesforce.com.

Industry research pundits from Gartner & IDC share Russell’s optimism, and many traditional software vendors have also jumped onto the SaaS bandwagon – Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and Adobe, amongst others, have recently launched hosted applications of various sorts. Many of these SaaS products are aimed squarely at the small & medium business (SMB) segment. The lower upfront cost of the SaaS model is often touted as a major selling point in the SMB market.

However, adopting SaaS-style hosted applications is not without its headaches – reliability, security & vendor lock-in are all very real issues that SMBs evaluating on-demand, hosted software must address carefully.