Salesforce announces aggressive expansion into UK

New UK data centre and London 'Salesforce Tower' revealed today

Cloud CRM company Salesforce.com has announced a large expansion and "permanent home" in the UK, revealing it is opening a UK data centre, as well as rebranding its City of London-based headquarters at Heron Tower as "Salesforce Tower London".

Making the announcement at the firm's Salesforce 1 World Tour conference in London today was Salesforce COO George Hu. He said that the company was proud to be opening the UK's first skyscraper named entirely after a company brand. The UK data centre is due to open later this year, with other data centres to follow in France and Germany in 2015.

Salesforce EMEA president Miguel Milano called the UK "fundamental to [Salesforce's] global strategy", ading that next year will see Salesforce "build on its positive impact in the UK with Salesforce customers, partners and application developers".

Typically for a Salesforce keynote, a parade of customers were asked to join the stage, including the UK Alzheimer's Society and the Big Issue.

The keynote proceeded to function as another opportunity to market the Salesforce1 mobile app, which was originally announced at 2013's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, and serves as a way to tie together the company's various products and APIs through a smartphone-based wrapper.