Children of a lesser God?
Mike Krigsman analyzes salesforce.com's outage...(update: and amazon's)
...and my question is why do we just pick on them or Google or Six Apart and other SaaS and utility computing vendors?
The bigger software and outsourcing firms publicly disclose zip about their bug volumes, service levels, up times etc. Of course, they do in individual customer contracts and their user groups expose the bugs, but I can tell you the majority of them have zillions of bugs in each release, and plenty of down time for maintenance, and only a handful of clients who expect global 24x7x365 support and who pay handsomely if they require it. If they did disclose their average performance and price, we would appreciate a lot more what Google and sfdc and other SaaS vendors deliver.
In this age of transparency, we should be pushing everyone to disclose more, not just slapping the SaaS vendors every time there is an outage...and as Chris Selland, a fellow EI points out to me periodically, users should also hold internal IT to performance benchmarks.
You know, up until companies such as Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Salesboom.com and RightNow, crm was not a service so down-time and outages were the responsibility of the clients. Also the software-as-a-service model is so great when it comes to upgrades, new features and bug fixes as they can be deployed transparently.
Posted by:Tom Greenberg | February 12, 2008 at 04:00 PM