Following my experience of a TypePad Outage last week, I find a potentially far more serious outage is causing critics to question the on-demand model – see Customers vent spleen at Salesforce.com outage and Salesforce Outage a Blow to On-Demand Sector?.
The timing is both a disaster and a benefit. For businesses reliant on the software to manage their pre-Christmas sales efforts, any prolonged downtime for their CRM software is a potential killer blow for firms heavily reliant on their Christmas sales. However, for Salesforce.com, the timing may mean that many people may not notice as they may already have finished work for the holiday period; offline trade magazines will not publish until the new year, so the PR impact may be less marked than if it had happened a week or so earlier. I will monitor the online fall-out from this outage, and see how Salesforce.com’s crisis management PR skills stand up.
