The power/service outages that both RIM and Salesforce.com suffered the past week are nothing new. Both companies have dealt with these well-publicized events in the past, both because of technical issues or upgrades.
SaaS providers have always claimed non-disruptive upgrades are an important reason why customers should buy online, but as is often the case, the reality falls far short of all the hype. That’s why it’s so important customers strenuously review a SaaS provider’s service level agreement (SLA) before committing to the vendor, and hold them to it when they don’t uphold their end of the deal.
And whether it’s data being downloaded to a BlackBerry or a business analyst running a query on customer data, the majority of businesses have, and always will, want to keep their data in-house. Both RIM and Salesforce are prime examples why companies want flexibility, the flexibility to house, manage, and run mission-critical applications themselves, or outsource those solutions if the situation calls for it.
Finally, I thought ZDNet blogger Phil Wainewright made a great point on his blog when he stated that Salesforce “testing should have caught these problems before they were released into the wild.” I could hardly agree more, and would also mention that community developers are great for catching such issues, such as the community of developers associated with an open source development model.
Salesforce.com is giving a bad name to the SaaS model. None of the other crm vendors such as Netsuite, Salesboom.com, RightNow or even Entellium suffered from such issues. I think Salesforce.com is spending the money on sales and marketing and not taking care of the software, upgrades, infrastructure, etc.