Salesforce.com Recovers from Daytime CRM Outage

Salesforce.coms on-demand customer relationship management service recovered Wednesday from a system outage that prevented users from accessing the system during business hours.

“Users experienced intermittent access” Tuesday from 9:30 a.m. to 12:41 p.m. eastern time and between 2:00 p.m. and 4:45 p.m. eastern time because of a database cluster error in one of the companys four global network nodes, company officials said in a statement Wednesday.

“Salesforce.com addressed the issue with the database vendor,” so that service could be restored in the afternoon, the statement said.

After a troubled day on Tuesday, “its running like a thoroughbred today,” Bruce Francis, Salesforce.coms vice president of corporate strategy said Wednesday. Salesforce.com, based in San Francisco, runs its CRM applications on Oracle Corp. relational database.

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However, Francis declined to confirm whether the Oracle database itself was responsible for the outage.

“We never point fingers at vendors whenever we have problems,” Francis said. “Our database infrastructure is composed of many different components from many different vendors and Oracle is one of those vendors,” Francis said.

“We dont believe it is good corporate policy to identify vendors” whose products might be involved in a system outage, he added.

The outage came during the holiday season when some of Salesforce.coms customers would be dealing with their heaviest sales volumes.

However, Francis said he wasnt aware that the outage had caused particular problems for online retailers or other types of CRM customers.

“There is never a good time of the year to be unavailable. That is the way we look at it,” Francis said.

When the outage occurred, Salesforce.com executives got on the phone with customers to try to assure them that the company was doing everything it could to restore full service as soon as possible, he said.

“We completely apologized to them,” and tried to assure customers that the company was working to give them access to the most “secure, reliable, available and serviceable” on-demand system, Francis said.

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