Salesforce.com has recently experienced some downtime, causing serious frustration for their users during a busy time of year (when isn’t, really?). What can businesses learn from this issue?
Salesforce.com is a web based customer relationship management (CRM) program used by more than 18,700 customers and 351,000 paying subscribers from mostly small to mid-sized businesses to help managed their contacts, sales cycles, and post-sales relationships with their customers. This is a fairly revolutionary business because they’ve managed to convince businesses that they’re better off storing some of their most valuable and mission critical data on Salesforce.com’s servers rather than keeping that data in-house.
While their growth has been impressive, there have been some occasional bumps in the road, including rough updates and occasional outages. Due to the mission critical nature of the application, loyal customers can quickly become royally pissed off when the site doesn’t work. Other web based businesses experiencing recent extended outages include Typepad, del.icio.us, and Bloglines.
What is an acceptable amount of downtime for a mission critical application like this? Salesforce.com states that they have greater than 99% uptime, but with 365 days in a year, mean they could be down for more than three days while still meeting that metric. An even worse case scenario that meets the “greater than 99% uptime” bar would be nine days of downtime per year during normal business hours.
Salesforce.com’s performance as of late is nowhere near the worse case scenario, and will probably improve significantly in reaction to the complaints and press they’ve received about their current glitches. People wouldn’t be complaining or writing about them if they didn’t find their service valuable.
Looking beyond Salesforce.com, here are some things to consider when reviewing outsourcing business applications to web based services.
Advantages of Using Web Based Applications
- Very low start-up costs vs. building a custom systems in-house.
- Fixed costs based on a subscription model.
- Software stays current since vendor can continuously add enhancements to the web based service.
- System is accessible from any internet connection.
- Gives small businesses access to people highly skilled in managing mission critical data.
- May integrate with other online or offline applications, such as WebEx, Treo Phones, etc.
Disadvantages of Using Web Based Applications
- May not communicate with other in-house systems.
- Could be a HUGE problem if the company was to go out of business.
- May not be customizable as an in-house solution.
- May be slower than a client application accessing data on your own network.
The technology trend here is toward web based applications purchased on a subscription basis. Businesses are figuring out that they are better off spending their time focusing on their core business objectives rather than building - or purchasing and maintaining - administrative applications other companies have mastered and provide through the web on a subscription basis.
Note: SalesForceWatch.com has published a set of tips covering Outage Prevention and Mitigation for Salesforce.com. This may help keep your staff productive rather than relying on tip #5 during outages: Solitaire.
Recent Comments