SalesForce.com outages over? Doesn't look like it!

Salesforce.com (CRM) is by far the most well known CRM company in the industry but they are far from the most accessible. Huh? Salesforce.com has outages? Yes, it happens more often than anyone wants to admit, especially in the salesforce camp.

The most well known outage was in 2005 and it has had periodic issues since with the most recent being March 9th 2007 when the connections with the highly touted AppExchange platform seemed non existant. One of the salesforce.com partners said that the outage took 2 days to correct.

With problems like this how can they continue to grow when their are much better solutions like NetSuite available? The answer is in a large budget set aside for marketing.

Now it seems that instead of fixing the problem they have added a partner on deck that will put the data on other availible server in case such an incident were to happen again.

Having a partner to do this service seems like a good idea, but one would think that the SFDC camp would almost be cringing while signing the contract.

It's such a shame that companies pay a premium service for a SaaS model and it comes to having to pay more just to have access to your data.

This is why executives and sales leaders need to ask their CRM vendor if they can provide a guaranteed uptime.