Salesforce.com Confirms Minor CRM Outage

Salesforce.com confirmed that it experienced a “minor interruption” Thursday of its hosted customer relationship management application service in the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions.

However, the interruption occurred “in the middle of the night there, and we are not aware of customer issues,” resulting from the outage, Bruce Francis, the companys vice president of corporate strategy, said in a brief written statement Friday.

Francis indicated that interruption didnt have any lasting effects. “The system is running just fine—no issues,” the statement said. Francis offered no details on whether the outage was related to a database bug, which the company said knocked its service offline last month.

Customers and competitors have been keeping a close watch on the fast-growing companys performance since it experienced a service outage that lasted for most of the day on Dec 20.

Salesforce.com officials said the outage was the result of a database bug that it was working to fix. Salesforce.com runs its CRM applications on Oracle Databases.

Competitors were quick to raise questions about whether Salesforce.com was experiencing scalability problems as a result of its rapid growth in 2005, which Salesforce.com officials denied.

Despite sustaining two service outages in the past month, Salesforce.com probably hasnt lost its customers confidence, said Peter Goldmacher, a software industry and stock market analyst with SG Cowen & Co. in San Francisco.

“I have talked to a number of customers and the prevailing opinion is that Salesforce.com does a better job of maintaining uptime than a lot of companies can do with their own in-house systems,” Goldmacher said.

The issue might “slow down some sales cycles as some companies exercise prudence and good sense” and try to find out what is going on in Salesforce.coms hosted infrastructure, he said.

“It is the kind of thing that competitors could make hay about right now,” especially if the problems persist, he said.

The fact remains that Salesforce.coms uptime is likely “still in the high 97 to 98 percent range and that is probably still better” than the performance of most companies internal IT systems, Goldmacher added.

Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis about customer relationship management solutions.