1. SaaS vendors should consider following Arena Solution's lead in making transparent their system status and service levels:

http://www.arenasolutions.com/uptime

Posted at 2:08PM on Apr 27th 2006 by ODS

2. Salesforce.com has a similar site, but without the uptime percentage:

http://trust.salesforce.com

Posted at 5:51PM on Apr 27th 2006 by Peter

3. Aaagh. Salesforce.com as the darling of SaaS providers? Don't bet on it. Their constant outages and ignorant comments makes every SaaS vendor out there cringe. Their failures reflect on the whole industry - even though it's got nothing to do with the service quality for the rest of us. Our company has a Service agreement which guarantees uptime. If the system goes down -- which is very rare, the company sends out email notices of the problem and expected time to fix to every customer immediately. As far as Salesforce taking great steps to notify users of problems - give me a break! They had to do that this past December because there was so much bad press over how horribly they handled the big outage they had. They had no information to give to their customers and no idea when they'd be back up. There are so many great SaaS vendors out there who have been doing their thing well without all of Salesforce's big problems. I think Salesforce.com is genius in taking their mistakes and making the rest of SaaS look bad while they look great because of all their "big steps".

Posted at 10:46AM on Apr 28th 2006 by Jennifer

4. Jennifer, I'm sure that Salesforce isn't the darling of Saas vendors but I think they are of some Saas cheerleaders. I'm sure that many folks have been doing the same sorts of communication for years. How many vendors hype what they are doing out of neccesity when less flashy folks have been doing the same things in good faith for years?! Thanks for the details you provide here. My knowledge is spread thin enough and the topics this blog covers are wide enough that the experience of readers like yourself posted in comments are an essential part of the discussion. Thanks!

Posted at 10:59AM on Apr 28th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick

5. trust.salesforce.com doesn't give a true picture. Take a look at what they noted on 4/6/2006. The statement sounds like it was a minor issue that was resolved quickly. This is not the case. We were completely down for over 5.5 hours. I was in touch with them every half hour. They could not tell me when it would be fix or what the problem was, just that they were working on it.

As far as an SLA, if you push the issue with them they will provide you with an SLA, but what it guarantees isn't worth your time to get it.

The most frustrating thing about salesforce.com and the outages is how they play it down in the media, almost as if it was a non-event and the people that are complaining are making a big deal out of nothing. In fact I was copied on a correspondence where if you read down the history of the email thread they referred to me as a “Bitter Betty” because I wanted someone higher than my account executive to give me an explanation for their outage that had left us down for more than 8 hours. Yes, a different outage than the one on 4/6/2006. I really like the name calling.

And if CEO Marc Benioff finds that outages are resulting in a storm of bad media coverage which in someway bizarre way is creating more sales, then perhaps this is a new marketing strategy on their part.

Posted at 4:06PM on Apr 28th 2006 by Mark

6. Jennifer, do you mind giving your company's name? How many customers are using your system? What's the number of transactions everyday? According to trust.salesforce.com, they handle 40 million transactions a way with average response time of 250 miliseconds. The salesforce.com outages are apparently triggered by their ever growing number of customers. Their application went live in Mar 2000. I haven't heard any outage stories before Dec 2005. When you are small, you don't get much load on the system. Even if you have outages, nobody notices since so few people are using your service. Remember eBay in 1999? http://news.com.com/eBay+outages+nothing+new/2100-1017_3-227078.html

Posted at 12:33AM on Apr 29th 2006 by Alex

7. It might be true that since salesforce is the biggest on demand CRM provider, they get noticed more when they go down, but lets not forget that many other players have big name customers that will not tolerate outages neither.

Salesforce.com is based on hype, and even the bad press they are receiving is helping them sell more! This to me sounds like maybe they should go down again to get more customers!

Also on their trust web site they say they are the first to offer a performance monitor transparently, which is a big lie! Let’s remember that this tool was only released after the December outages, and other smaller rivals have been offering this tool since a long time ago.

http://monitor.salesboom.com/monitor.jsp

And while an SLA is only for preferred customers at SFDC, many other rivals such as Netsuite, Salesnet, Salesboom and Entellium offer it standard to all customers.

Posted at 3:10PM on May 3rd 2006 by Rami