4

I had a requirement to quote a Salesforce implementation for a client. It has a lot of data with low license count. Initially it was in the 200.000 records + Campaigns and Campaign Members, which the 1GB you get in an enterprise edition was enough. The problem is that now the requirement is including over 4 millions contacts with future Campaigns and Campaign Members to consider. Issue is that with something around 2KB per Contact and 1KB per CampaignMember data needed will be over 10GB, by my estimates. The number of Enterprise/Unlimited licenses needed for this is prohibitive. Adding chunks of 500MB (which there is no official number in SF documentation, but Internet search says it's as an Enterprise Edition) also goes WAY off budget.

So what technical options would I have here to cope with this requirement+budget? They already have Salesforce so they are not too keen onto moving to a different platform (I understand storage in SugarCRM, Zoho or Saleslogix is a lot cheaper). My approach so far is to do a Heroku integration, store everything on Heroku and access it through SF and manage the logic there. The integration should be quite as challenge but not as costly as that many licenses. There are requirements for other integrations in the way (like Amazon) so it made sense.

So in short the question is, how would you handle this situation? What is a good way to handle a SF instance that has too many records (and not historic records unfortunately, so SF new archiving solution doesn't address this).

Thanks

PS: the client is well aware that changes to the scope/requirement affect the budget. I still need to look for different options.

Improve this question
3
  • 2
    While this may not be the answer you wanted to hear... I'm guessing that the cost of additional storage will likely be less expensive than paying you to build this work-around. Data storage is (sometimes) discounted in large volume purchases, you should have your client have this conversation with their Salesforce Account Executive.
    – greenstork
    Commented Oct 24, 2014 at 15:45
  • Why is the number of licenses prohibitive? I'm not aware of a connection between storage limits and licenses.
    – Jagular
    Commented Oct 24, 2014 at 16:06
  • SF gives you a starting block of 1GB for your instance. It also gives you 20MB/120MB for each enterprise/unlimited license whichever is higher. So you need 51 enterprise and 11 unlimited license to surpass the starting 1GB Documentation: help.salesforce.com/… Blog about it: shellblack.com/data/storage
    – PePe QuiCoSE
    Commented Oct 24, 2014 at 16:13

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

As @greenstork suggested, your best bet is to have the client have a discussion with their Salesforce AE. Salesforce will negotiate this type of thing down, especially for large volume like this. The cost most likely isn't as bad as you may think.

With that said and depending on your use case, you may want to consider something as well like Lightning Connect (demo). If they have this data in an external data source, this may be a good route as well.

Improve this answer
2
  • I'm confused about Lighting Connect. Is it widely available already? Lighting components as I understand won't be until February '15. Heroku Connect would seem like an option, but from reading the documentation I understood it replicates data on both sites. The other option I consider is External Objects.
    – PePe QuiCoSE
    Commented Oct 24, 2014 at 20:06
  • 1
    Lightning Connect is the branded term for external objects.
    – Jesse Altman
    Commented Oct 24, 2014 at 22:20

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .