Salesforce.com outages - part II
A couple of further thoughts on the SFdC outages and on demand in general:
- Liz Herbert over at Forrester did a piece recommending that SaaS customers push their vendors for standard SLAs around availability and that they demand compensation for outages. Seems that while NetSuite (99.5%) and Salesnet(99.6%) offer standard SLAs, SFdC doesn't. My understanding is that for large clients, SFdC, if pushed, will include an SLA in the contract, but that smaller customers get no SLA love. Unbelievable. When I was in consulting, I did some work with clients around SLAs from both their internal IT departments as well as outsourced IT. SLAs, at least around infrastructure, db and app servers, if not full application availability, are pretty common, at least in most larger companies. Why wouldn't you expect the same from your app vendor?
- I've heard conflicting statements about whether SFdC had its new Mirrorforce datacenters up and running at the time of the latest outages (January 30). Benioff seemed to blame these outages on the new data centers. Question: was Mirrorforce fully in place when these outages took place? If so, what does this mean regarding SFdC's ability going forward to reach it's desired availability? If anyone has any insight into this, please comment.
- I registered at the Salesnet site a few weeks ago b/c I wanted to access the Free Test Drive area. I entered my company name (SAP), role(strategy), everything fully legit. (I did use my yahoo email address as I didn't want to clog up my work inbox with marketing material). Turns out last week I got a voicemail from a salesperson there wanting to speak with me about how her company's products can help my company become more successful. :) Wonder if they were using there own CRM system to filter prospects. Or did she not recognize the SAP name?
- Liz Herbert over at Forrester did a piece recommending that SaaS customers push their vendors for standard SLAs around availability and that they demand compensation for outages. Seems that while NetSuite (99.5%) and Salesnet(99.6%) offer standard SLAs, SFdC doesn't. My understanding is that for large clients, SFdC, if pushed, will include an SLA in the contract, but that smaller customers get no SLA love. Unbelievable. When I was in consulting, I did some work with clients around SLAs from both their internal IT departments as well as outsourced IT. SLAs, at least around infrastructure, db and app servers, if not full application availability, are pretty common, at least in most larger companies. Why wouldn't you expect the same from your app vendor?
- I've heard conflicting statements about whether SFdC had its new Mirrorforce datacenters up and running at the time of the latest outages (January 30). Benioff seemed to blame these outages on the new data centers. Question: was Mirrorforce fully in place when these outages took place? If so, what does this mean regarding SFdC's ability going forward to reach it's desired availability? If anyone has any insight into this, please comment.
- I registered at the Salesnet site a few weeks ago b/c I wanted to access the Free Test Drive area. I entered my company name (SAP), role(strategy), everything fully legit. (I did use my yahoo email address as I didn't want to clog up my work inbox with marketing material). Turns out last week I got a voicemail from a salesperson there wanting to speak with me about how her company's products can help my company become more successful. :) Wonder if they were using there own CRM system to filter prospects. Or did she not recognize the SAP name?
posted by Mark Crofton at
10:34 AM
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