“Longest 12 hours” says Aneel Bhusri. He is not talking about the recent marathon negotiation with EMC over the takeover of Data Domain, where he was Chairman (via his role with the VC firm, Greylock).
He is talking about the recovery from the NAS outage the SaaS HR vendor Workday suffered the week before. Yes, as President there, he worked on the recovery.
Then proceeded to blog about it – humbly acknowledging “any unplanned outage is unacceptable”
So, how much pissed off customer feedback did they get?
Dave Duffield, his Workday co-founder: “Unbelievably, I got emails from couple of our customers basically saying “ Better you than me”. They are so glad they are not being woken up middle of the night. That’s our job now”
As I sat down with Aneel and Dave last week at HRTech in Chicago, I walked away rubbing my eyes.
Someone who deals in billions of dollars rolling up his sleeves on a data center issue. Then transparently blogging the mea culpa. And customers saying “don’t sweat it – you are doing better than what we had”
If on-premise vendors were not concerned about SaaS and cloud vendors, this episode should be a loud wake-up call.
BTW - I did not even mention the overwhelming economic advantage the next-generation of vendors offers. Written plenty of that in the past.
