February 6, 2006 (Computerworld) --
For the second time in just over a month, users of Salesforce.com Inc.'s hosted CRM system faced service interruptions, leading some to question whether the vendor is doing enough to make amends for the outages. The San Francisco-based CRM and application services provider acknowledged the glitch last Monday, just weeks after a major crash in December that was caused by a database-related problem. "The system is running normally now," said Chief Strategist Bruce Francis. "We know that what our customers want most is continued improvements in reliability and availability, and we are always working on that." Although none of the half-dozen users interviewed said the outages were causing them to consider dumping the vendor, a couple of them suggested actions that Salesforce.com could take to mitigate problems caused by downtime. "When Salesforce.com goes down, everyone in the company is affected," said Tom Kramer, president of Bella Pictures. The San Francisco-based wedding photography company has used Salesforce.com for two years, and Kramer said the service has been "instrumental" to the company's growth. He said that Bella employees can continue to work during outages that last less than an hour, even if productivity suffers a bit. On the other hand, Kramer said, outages lasting two hours or more can be "much more dramatic." He called on Salesforce.com to notify users of outages that could last more than 45 minutes so they can plan "alternative strategies."
Making Amends Kramer acknowledged that financial penalties for outages would limit Salesforce.com's incentive to sign up major clients, but he suggested that the company offer less-costly responses, such as free training, integration assistance or extra tickets to the Dreamforce user conference. "At the very least, they could have acknowledged it, apologized and credited us a day's worth of downtime for every day that had outages," said Geoff Graham, president of GuildQuality Inc., an Atlanta-based producer of customer surveys for home builders and a former Salesforce.com customer. GuildQuality switched from Salesforce.com to a rival hosted system from NetSuite Inc. last February for its targeted accounting and sales capabilities, not because of Salesforce.com outages. However, Graham noted that his company suffered through Salesforce.com outages that lasted from 30 minutes to two hours. And if GuildQuality had experienced the outage that occurred last month, "our sales force would have mutinied," he said. Graham said that despite the performance problems, hosted CRM is a viable technology. "The crashes aren't the product of a fundamentally flawed business model or product design -- they're a result of too much focus on acquiring new users and not enough focus on servicing the users they have," he said. Other customers also downplayed the outages, noting that
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By helping Intel with loosened 'Vista Capable' requirements, Microsoft 'severely damaged' its credibility, said an HP exec in a newly unsealed Feb. 2006 e-mail.
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