Salesforce Adds Dell Subscriptions

Salesforce has vastly increased its download subscription software subscription sales to Dell.

Salesforce.com has announced that Dell, the PC maker, intends to vastly increase its subscriptions of the company’s Web-delivered software, rising from 15,000 to a whopping 40,000.

That comes on the back of an order of 40,000 subscriptions from the Japanese post office (which, evidently, is also the world’s largest savings bank).

It shows that the “on demand” subscription model for software delivered over the Internet could be the way forward, rather than the traditional method of buying a license for applications loaded onto a computer hard drive.

“It’s a landmark transaction,” said Salesforce Chief Executive Benioff. “You really get the feeling that Japan is poised to become the second huge market for on-demandcomputing.”   Estimates are that the global revenue from Web-delivered software will rise from this year’s $5.1 billion to $11.5 billion by 2011.   But with the growth in themarket comes the competition. Microsoft will roll out its own version of Web-delivered business software in the next month of two, and SAP is also preparing a Web-delivered service.