February 1, 2006 (Computerworld) --
Despite the well-publicized interruptions that have bedeviled Salesforce.com Inc.'s hosted CRM service in recent months, a half-dozen users said this week that their relationships with the vendor remain strong.
The San Francisco-based CRM and applications services provider this week acknowledged a delivery glitch on Monday (see "Salesforce.com suffers another outage"). This follows a major crash in December caused by a database-related problem, allowing Salesforce.com's competitors and online bloggers, to keep the company's service woes in the public eye (see "Update: Salesforce.com outage cuts users off").
While system unavailability can be a problem, it's not yet a make-or-break issue, according to customers interviewed this week.
"When Salesforce.com goes down, everyone in the company is affected," said Tom Kramer, president of Bella Pictures. The wedding photography services company has used Salesforce.com's service for two years, and Kramer says the service has been "instrumental" to the company's growth. In fact, Kramer considers Salesforce.com to be a major utility, like electricity or Internet access. "So were we affected [on Monday]? Yes, but it wasn't catastrophic and not nearly as disruptive as the outages in December. Anytime we experience major utility outage, Bella Pictures and our clients are affected."
Kramer said that employees can continue to work during outages that last less than an hour, even if productivity suffers a bit. On the other hand, an outage lasting two hours or more "is much more dramatic," he said. Despite the recent glitches, he said, "I don't think you sever a relationship with a partner because they have a few bumps in the road." Kramer did add, however, that if Salesforce.com knows an outage might last 45 minutes or longer, it should notify users so they can plan "alternative strategies."
Other users also downplayed the outages, saying they had a negligible impact -- or were completely invisible to them -- and said Salesforce.com has begun sending out alerts when they occur.
"What would shake my faith is if something happened to the data," said Frank Tait, vice president of sales at DecisionOne Corp., a Devon, Pa.-based provider of IT services and a Salesforce.com user. "The integrity of the data is my concern."
He called Monday's outage an "inconvenience" and said his company's 125 users don't access the system around the clock. When it's unavailable, workers do something else for a few minutes until it's restored. "Even with the recent outages, Salesforce.com is more reliable than our internal systems. We have many more issues with them," Tait said.
Outages occurred before last month's well-publicized glitch, according to Geoff Graham, president of GuildQuality Inc., an Atlanta-based producer of customer surveys for home builders and a former Salesforce.com customer.
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