Salesforce.com Outage – > Insert Pithy Storm Cloud Joke Here <

The Twitter-sphere is buzzing (or maybe the right term is tweezing) with news and commentary on yesterday's service outage which left their North American customers without service for 30 minutes or so. Salesforce.com has experienced several outages in recent years. The major outages happened two months ago, as well as in December 2005 and January 2009, with separate minor outages recorded in January 2006.

Major disruptions also occured in April 2006, while several Cloud platforms, including Salesforce.com and Amazon's EC2 and S3 environments, together with major ecommerce sites like Walmart.com, were also affected by a DoS attack. The attack affected users of NeuStar's ultraDNS service, which translates web addresses into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

While supporters of SaaS and the Service Cloud have mobilized to defend Salesforce.com, and the supports of premise-based solutions have fired back, most of the conversation reads like a group of 3rd graders talking about whose Dad is stronger. You're either all right or all wrong – and this time it's personal. And while there are many zealous opinions, there is very little substance. 

To borrow from the parlance of our times, I have no bird in this particular cloud. Jacada's WorkSpace Agent Desktop, by design, can be deployed both on-premise and, when called upon, in an Enterprise Cloud architecture. And, in fact, our Fusion products are often a powerful bridge integrating SaaS / Cloud-based applications with legacy and premise based systems. Flexibility and choice has been our focus, not necessarily ideology.

To that end, I would propose an end to the ideological rant for and against “the Cloud”.  Put simply:

• Vendors should stop the nonsensical corporate sloganry and get real.
• Analysts should no longer portray any approach as all right or all wrong and admit that the reality is somewhere in between.
• Customers should hold us all accountable, by demanding transparency and a real dialogue about where and when these kinds of technologies make sense.

There are things SaaS does very well, and others it doesn't. Under the right circumstances, businesses can save money and operational resources. For mission critical productivity applications, though, such as those used in call centers, they may not deliver the control and performance an enterprise needs.  Less rhetoric and more transparency is the only way to ensure customers understand the complete picture and make choices that will deliver the results their businesses demand.