Recently, enterprise cloud computing provider Salesforce. com (www. salesforce. com) opened its first international data center in Singapore, since a record numbers of customers in the Asia-Pacific region are adopting Salesforce's customer relationship management applications and the new Force. com platform.

According to an announcement made by Salesforce on Wednesday, the company will be able to meet the service demands of its rapidly growing international customer base by the means of the new Singapore facility, apart from widening the capacity, redundancy and scalability of its infrastructure, consisting of two North American data centers.

Via a statement, Salesforce's international enterprise sales Vice President, Lindsey Armstrong, said: "CIOs and IT departments at Asia-Pacific enterprises recognize the innovation, time-to-value and ease-of-use that Salesforce delivers with cloud computing. Enterprises are realizing that this is the era of cloud computing, and salesforce. com gives businesses the ability to harness the power of cloud computing to better their companies."

With the help of Salesforce. com cloud computing applications, including the Sales Cloud and the Service Cloud, as well as the Force. com platform for developing and deploying custom cloud applications, customers are able to concentrate on managing their businesses, instead of dealing with the cost and complexity associated with software and hardware infrastructure.

In the first quarter of fiscal 2010, the number of Asia-Pacific Salesforce customers exceeded 5,000, including industry leaders Crocs, Pacnet and Ricoh.

According to the Salesforce Chairman and chief executive officer, Marc Benioff, Asia-Pacific is its fastest growing market, making the new data center project an obvious step in bringing enterprise cloud services to the region.

Benioff said: "Our new Singapore data center represents continued investment in our global real-time infrastructure to accelerate customer success with cloud computing worldwide."

A new network operations center headquartered in Singapore will be supporting the data center infrastructure, which would be enabled 24x7, to follow-the-sun monitoring of the company's data centers in North America and Singapore.