Salesforce Backup and Restore Debuts
In a soft launch today, Salesforce debuted Backup and Restore, which is an easy-to-use native backup system that allows Salesforce platform owners perform backup and restore functions. Backup and Restore is expected to become generally available October 2021. Salesforce customers are encouraged to contact their account representatives for pricing details.
Designed for Compliance
The product data sheet claims the service meets the requirements for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements for data security and compliance. This new offering is coming out of the Salesforce Security products group.
According to Marla Hay, Salesforce’s VP of Product Management, “Customers will be able to automate daily backups of standard objects, custom objects, and files and attachments in Salesforce. Customers will also be able to restore backed-up data into orgs, automatically delete old backups after designated time intervals, and perform high-level audits on who is initiating, modifying, or running backups.”
What About the ISVs?
Salesforce has always lacked a usable backup and recovery feature. Some hard-to-use services are available. But performing a restore could be nightmarish for a platform owner facing the need to restore data.
That is how OwnBackup became a hugely successful and valuable independent software vendor. Insight Partners has led the way to OwnBackup attaining a $3.5B valuation and hoovering up other independent software vendors.
Ms. Hay addresses this issue in a prepared statement. “Salesforce customers enjoy the benefits of a rich partner ecosystem,” she said.
“But we’ve spent a lot of time listening to our customers, and it became clear many of them were specifically looking for native backup and restore solutions that delivered the performance, speed and scale – not to mention ease of use – they’ve come to expect from the Salesforce Platform,” she added.
“Backup and Restore is a direct response to that demand that will continue to provide additional ways to innovate and extend the solutions found throughout our ecosystem,” said Ms Hay in the statement.
Vendor Hegemony
Salesforce has obviously made a conscious decision to compete with OwnBackup. But, this is less an act of betrayal than Salesforce simply keeping customers happy.
Major international companies treat their partner ecosystem poorly all the time. In the early 1990’s there was a very competitive market for disk compression utilities, and it was an early example of an information technology ecosystem success for several companies.
But, eventually Microsoft made an acquisition, and the market for disk compression utilities evaporated. Companies were folded and jobs were lost. This has been repeated time and again with Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS.
There are several reasons why Salesforce would decide to have its own product versus making a deeper relationship with an existing company like OwnBackup. First, some Salesforce customers cannot easily create new vendor relationships, but can add a new product to their existing Salesforce contract. There may be geographies and other markets not serviced by OwnBackup. They could also simply want the revenue they see laying on the table.
No Acquisition
Why didn’t Salesforce just acquire OwnBackup? Good question. It could be the price. OwnBackup also seems to be on a mission to have an initial public offering (IPO). And, it is on its way to acquire a significant part of the ISV ecosystem. That would have given Salesforce indigestion with too many parts in the deal.
There is a natural proclivity for global enterprise software companies to have hegemonic tendencies. This means, after a certain point, the corporate power needs to engulf everything around them in order to keep growing. It is all part of the need for growth in public companies.
Good for Salesforce Devops
Nevertheless, this announcement bolsters Salesforce devops for architects and platform owners. Backup and restore are absolutely key activities in devops pipelines. This is especially true when it comes to extract, translate and load (ETL) operations, profile management, metadata transformations, and many other functions. Improved data security and compliance are also key requirements for all enterprise application delivery activities.
it will be interesting to see if Salesforce Backup and Restore will eventually be integrated into the DevOps Center command server and branching functions when Salesforce DevOps Center finally becomes available next year.
