CRM

A bad day for the giants in CRM?

(Marketing Week) - The first was from Salesforce.com to advise me that its service would be unavailable from 06.00PM ">sic to 11.00PM on Saturday 13^th February. The second related to the £709 million lawsuit BSkyB had just won a substantial part of against EDS (now part of HP).

First, lets take that Salesforce.com email. Are they shutting down from 06.00 until 23.00, or from 18.00 to 23.00, or from 06.00 to 11.00? Their mix of the 24-hour clock and PM is just plain confusing. Let’s assume it is from 18.00 to 23.00 on Saturday. Now, while that may be fine in the corporate sales world, what about all the companies that use SF.Com as part of their e-commerce or call-centre application?

Saturday evening from 18.00 to 23.00 is actually a fairly peak time – especially as it is the evening before Valentine’s Day and many people will be scratching around trying to find a last-minute solution. And one week’s notice? A bit poor, I’d say, for planned maintenance. This sounds more like, “damn, we’re gonna have to shut down real soon to fix X!”

Part of the problem with SF.com is that it is a “multi-tenanted” database – that is, everyone’s data is in the same database. So, if they need to fix something, everyone gets kicked off. A vastly better solution is to put each customer’s data into a unique instance – but then that would increase costs. Other hosted solution providers can do it though, us included.

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