Salesforce.com's Cloud Dissipated: Severe Outage

As seen in this latest weather report it seems Salesforce.com Clouds have dissipated yesterday as they experienced a 30 to 40 minute complete outage. Blogs have been talking and apparently not only their CRM Software services were lost but their entire web site was down.

With Salesforce.com down in the middle of a business day for 30 to 40 minutes countless organizations were without their data and the tools required to complete their work. As stated by PC World Salesforce services were largely unavailable across all regions between 12:39 pm and 1:17 pm PST in the US. It was also stated that even their trust.salesforce was down stopping customers from even retrieving outage updates.

Salesforce.com has acknowledged the issue but did not say what had caused the issue leaving some wondering. On a side note Salesforce.com does not offer its customer a service level agreement which would guarantee a certain amount of uptime. So far the only CRM vendor who offers a service level agree is Salesboom.com which promises a 99.8% uptime.

2008 SIIA On Demand SaaS Conference

It’s that time of year; we’re now in the middle of the 2008 Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) On Demand Software as a Service (SaaS) Conference. At this year’s conference the key note speakers include Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, Josh James, CEO and Co-Founder of Omniture, Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President of Oracle CRM and Zach Nelson, CEO of Netsuite. It is truly a who’s who of the On Demand SaaS CRM world this year. The San Jose conference line-up is action packed this year with Josh James starting for the key notes speaking about the secret to SaaS success. Following next for the keys is Marc Benioff talking as Salesforce.com often does about Platform as a Service. Starting things off on the 19th Anthony Lye speaks about how social computing meets the enterprise and Zach Nelson discuses Cloud Computing.

Outside of the key notes there are many great topics being discussed over the few days including many presentations from early stage SaaS provides, revenue extension, how to grow business in a slow economy, how to extend SaaS across multiple verticals, service integrity and much more.

Other CEO’s of major On Demand SaaS CRM vendors are also present providing their expertise to the event. Among these is CEO and Co-Founder of Salesboom.com, Troy Muise who is discussing Customer Retention focusing on corporate processes, at risk signs and organizational structure in relation to customer retention.

The SIIA On Demand Conference isn’t just about business, the event is packed with networking opportunities. These give the best minds in the industry a chance to share their knowledge and experiences, even industry rivals Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff and Salesboom.com’s Troy Muise put their swords away and were seen shaking hands at the event.

This is the third annual SIIA On Demand SaaS Conference and it has proven over the past 3 years to be one of the must attend events for the industry. I am looking forward to next year’s event already and urge everyone to attend if they can.

Benioff's loss of interest is hurting SMB's

The latest Salesforce.com news is all about the speculated proposal of their shares to Oracle, this combined with the fact that Marc Benioff is selling his Salesforce.com shares daily makes one wonder, how interested is he? Apparently Oracle was approached and offered Salesforce at a price of $75 per share, this was roughly 50% higher then the closing $50.87 of that day. Whether this move makes sense or not for either of the companies involved is not what I am concerned about. If this transaction were to take place all the small to medium sized businesses currently with Salesforce are going to suffer.

Right now Salesforce.com is the largest Web Based CRM Software vendor on the market, their prices are already the highest and their focus has been moving away from SMB's in attempts to attract large corporation's. If Salesforce was under the direction of Oracle, SMB's would only suffer more since their focus also overlooks SMB's.

What this means for the other Web Based CRM Software vendors like Salesboom.com or Entellium for example, is that there could be a lot more of what is already happening to come in the future. Salesboom has noted that a large number of their clients were former Salesforce.com customers who were fed up with high prices and lack of support for smaller companies. The possibility of Salesforce changing hands could mean a lot more SMB's will be looking else where for their CRM solutions.