Salesforce.com customers had to cope with another outage
to the company’s hosted customer relationship management (CRM) this
week, which meant some companies couldn’t access their sales
records for the best part of a day.
Salesforce.com said Monday’s outage only lasted half and hour,
but some of its customers claim the outage led to almost a day of
not being able to fully get access to their records.
Salesforce.com admits the outage caused “intermittent” problems
for some customers. The outage follows a major failure of the
Salesforce.com system last December, when the company admits its
system was down for the day.
The outage comes as SAP is about to launch its own hosted CRM
system in competition with Salesfore.com.
In addition, Oracle has successfully closed the deal to buy
Siebel, which is expected to see the combined larger company pose a
much more serious threat to Salesforce.com’s on-demand CRM
business.
Salesforce.com said the outages were caused by a database
problem in its system, which it is fixing.
Salesforce.com is one of the few companies to have turned the
hosted on-demand model into a successful business.