Spanning Cloud Apps Expands Backup to Salesforce.com

Spanning Cloud Apps is bringing its cloud-based backup and recovery service to Salesforce.com (CRM). The company introduced Spanning Backup for Salesforce at Dreamforce last week, but the full general release will not go live until sometime in the first quarter of 2014.

Salesforce.com is the latest cloud services provider Spanning has chosen to work with to provide backup and restore capabilities for its customers.

"Spanning is focused on providing leading-edge backup and recovery solutions for the most significant cloud applications. As the titan of enterprise cloud computing apps, Salesforce is a logical next step for us," said Jeff Erramouspe, CEO and president of Spanning Cloud Apps, in a prepared statement. "Salesforce is storing unfathomably large amounts of critical data—our backup and recovery solution ensures organizations are now fully protected from data mishaps and losses."

According to the company, its cloud backup offering will be the only one available that is embedded within the Salesforce user interface. The service will enable customers to review their backup and recovery information within the application without having to leave the Salesforce software.

For Spanning and its partners, this represents a huge opportunity. The company has had its share of successes, but Salesforce is the biggest CRM provider in the cloud space. Launching its software within that ecosystem presents a potentially massive opportunity for sales of its backup and recovery services.

A few of the key features include:

​The launch of Spanning Backup for Salesforce is so far only in private beta. When the SaaS goes into general availability in early 2014, the company will sell it on a per-user, per-year subscription basis.