Salesforce.com suffers 'minor' outage

Salesforce.com had another outage this morning PST. I am waiting to get the specific details on the outage from salesforce.com. So far, CEO Marc Benioff has said that some users in one of the North American instances had intermittent access early this morning. "We consider this a minor issue," Benioff said in an email message. "The episode lasted about 30 minutes or so."

Tracking software outages/reliability is becoming a kind of competitive sport. Salesnet, which calls itself the "no bull alternative to salesforce.com" was quick to respond to the brief outage in the Benioff camp, alerting some of the press to the problem. I talked to Salesnet co-founder and President Jonathan Tang. He claimed that the outage last more than a few hours, from around 10:30 AM to 2:00 PM EST.

"We have taken a new approach and started to market aggressively against salesforce.com since October of 2005," Tang said. "We have a log-in to a salesforce.com account to keep track and proactively gain competitive G2 and intelligence. We have been monitoring their application service levels and reaching out to our network on some of the things they have been hearing [about salesforce.com] and from our prospects."

Tang acknowledged that outages are inevitable. He said that Salesnet's last outage came in 2003. Salesforce.com's high profile and recent outages (three in the last two months) has fueled concerns about reliability for demand software. The company might be in part a victim of its own successÂ-growing faster than it can scale reliably. Salesforce.com expects that its $50 million build out of two new data centers and mirroring capabilities, due next month, will increase reliability.

In any case, the competition is heating up, which usually is good for customers. SAP is slated to join the hosted, on demand CRM fun this week. We'll do our best to make sense of the ongoing claims and counterclaimsÂ...