Salesforce.com customers who want their own dedicated infrastructure within the vendor’s cloud will now be able to obtain one through a partnership with Hewlett-Packard.

Announced at the Dreamforce conference taking place this week in San Francisco, the Salesforce Superpod will be based on HP’s Infrastructure hardware and jointly developed and marketed by Salesforce.com and HP.  These pods will be hosted in Salesforce.com’s data centers and will cost extra.  However, pricing details weren’t provided as of yet.

This seem a bit strange to me, considering that Salesforce.com has been promoting the using of public SaaS since the start.  However, there are those in Global 2000 enterprises who insist on owning the equipment where their data resides, and this is a way to fulfill that requirement…at a cost.

I suspect there is really no reason to leverage your own private servers within Salesforce.com, unless there are clear security and compliance issues at work.  For most enterprises, that won’t be the case.  It’s just a matter of wanting a greater degree of control while leveraging the public clouds.