Software as a service interrupted

The Tuesday before Christmas, a software problem with one of Salesforce.com’s database clusters caused the CRM service to be intermittently unreachable by some customers for six hours. That incident was one of several outages in December at SaaS (software as a service) providers, causing some customers to question the viability of the “on-demand” software model.

“Click and wait, click and wait” is how customer Charlie Crystle described his experience with Salesforce.com. Crystle, the CEO of nonprofit fund-raising software maker Mission Research, took out a handful of Salesforce.com subscriptions earlier this year. Although full-blown outages like Tuesday’s are rare, Crystle estimated that at least once per week the system slows to the point of being nearly unusable. He plans to switch to a homegrown, in-house sales management system.

Anecdotal reports suggest that the breakdown was among the most severe in Salesforce.com’s six-year history. “We are told the outage impacted a majority of customers,” First Albany analyst Mark Murphy wrote in a research note.

Salesforce’s troubles followed downtime from other SaaS providers. Six Apart’s TypePad blog-hosting service went down for the day on Dec. 16 after a failed storage upgrade. In addition, the del.icio.us bookmark-sharing service that Yahoo recently acquired suffered days of problems last week after its datacenter lost power.

Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone hopes Salesforce.com’s stumble won’t scare customers away from on-demand services, noting that internal software is hardly immune to breakdowns.

“I wouldn’t say this is indicative of a trend, or likely to happen again,” Kingstone said of Salesforce.com’s outage. “A lot of the vendors are putting very large investments in place to prevent these sorts of situations.”