Feature
What this new partnership will do is to give companies that sign up for a single company account with AppExchange unlimited space in the Amazon cloud to store content of any kind and share it by simply downloading it from within the Salesforce.com platform.
There really doesn’t seem to be any catch here with both companies saying that while the amount of information users can store is limitless, so are the types of files they can store, enabling users to upload all kinds of rich media as well as all their marketing and business related documents.
CyanGate And DAM
For those of you not familiar with them, CyanGate is a Virginia-based digital asset management (DAM) company that sells across all vertical industry sectors.
Their most recent product -- the S-Drive -- which they describe as an easy, secure and simple file management and distribution platform, has obvious applications in, for example, the media industry. Over the past ten years they have relentlessly developed their DAM software and now provide it across retail, financial and publishing Fortune 500 companies.
Salesforce, CyanGate And MAM
Salesforce and CyanGate have already worked together to produce a Media Asset Management (MAM) bridge for Salesforce.com.
Users can access marketing content directly from within Salesforce.com application
This bridge enables DAM and MAM applications to expose the most commonly used enterprise digital assets from within Salesforce.com. This content can be uploaded and downloaded at will with a record of all activity stored in the activity history.
Rich media content such as videos and images can easily be accessed directly from Salesforce.com application
Unless you've been living in cave for the past few years, you couldn’t be unaware of the developing importance of rich media in marketing and in customer relationship management (CRM), and of the file size limitations, or storage limitations that are imposed by some cloud providers.
Unlimited Storage
This is where S-Drive comes into its own and is the logical extension of the earlier DAM and MAM partnership between CyanGate and Salesforce.com. In effect, what it does is turn the enterprise network drive into a globally available, scalable online platform.
With it, professional and enterprise edition clients of Salesforce.com will have unlimited storage space with the ability to upload any file size they want using the new application (which includes an Adobe Flex rich user interface).
The cloud in question is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which provides enterprise level file encryption and accessibility.
But there is one small drawback -- it is not free. Pricing works out at US $15/GB per month of storage, US $1/GB of content transfer in or out for unlimited users and storage. So you probably won’t be able to store your entire film collection there without the bean counters getting wind of it. Too bad!
