Mr. Benioff:
I guess this must actually still be 1892, or some other year when it was OK for enterprise applications to just summarily shut down for awhile.
But of course, this is the Web-2.0-SaaS-is-King era, in which rock star architects and eloquent marketing folks convince all comers that all customers can trust SaaS providers, that anyone can bet their companies on these elegant, brand-spankin' new apps because the golden age of "trust-us-we'll-run-them-for-you" enterprise applications is finally upon us.
Except that it isn't. Not yet anyway ...
Is "One Nine" Enough?
The poster child for SaaS success is, of course, your company: salesforce.com. Only you guys must still be implementing with software architectures and infrastructure left over from the Great Depression (figuratively speaking, of course!), because any customer logging in to your oh-so-dominant offering today receives this not-so-elegant greeting:
WHY DOES SALESFORCE.COM STILL THINK THIS IS OK ?!?!?!?
A Fair Question
You may turn that back on me & say "Hey that's a planned outage ... besides, we're better than industry norms", or "Why don't you get a life and spend Saturday night with your family?" or, maybe, just maybe, "Ok, tough guy ... let's see you do better".
Now finally, that's a fair question.
The simple truth is we CAN do better. So can any of our customers for just about any or all of their applications ... and that would definitely include a new, improved, fabric-enabled salesforce.com ... or reasonable facsimile thereof.
Step Up Your Game
So if you're tired of telling your customers that they can't use what you have to sell, or if you're REALLY tired of explaining unintentional application "events", then check out what our application fabric could mean to even a large, mainstream, successful SaaS player like your organization.
Besides, you know very well how this game is played - aggressively step up your game at all times. Time is short for anyone who gets too comfortable ... as soon as you think that where you're at is good enough, well, someone else may just choose to play by a different set of rules.
Don't you just LOVE the smell of innovation in the morning?
Sincerely,
Bob Lozano
Appistry
Technorati Tags: availability, commoditization, datacenter, outage, salesforce.com, Benioff, reliability, web 2.0, web+2.0
Salesforce.com had many
Salesforce.com had many outages in 2006, and they will eventually have many more hick-ups. They also don't offer an SAL, while other rivals such as Netsuite and Salesboom.com offer an uptime guarantee.
All good points... scale
All good points... scale does make reliably harder to do, and it's a great thing that competitive forces are raising the bar for all participants.
Of course, it's one thing to offer SLAs as a business / marketing strategy, it's another to actually deliver!
it's all a compromise
it's all a compromise between new features and downtime. if you want lots of new features on a regular basis. if you want fast reports and dashboards and seemless upgrades, it comes at the cost of downtime. if you look at systems that give you lots of uptime, then you'll find very few new features. you'll find upgrades on a glacial pace, and you'll find catastrophes occasionally when upgrades to happen.
salesforce has a track record of regular feature upgrades, with an improving track record of quality, and a competitive price. yes, we all want more 9s, but you have to recognize that they don't come for free.
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