It’s OK – you can trust me
December 2005. January 2006.
I remember the events so clearly, for two reasons. One – They were major disruptions & completely halted business operations. And two – it hasn’t happened since.
I’m talking about the hours-long service interruptions that salesforce.com users experienced over 5 years ago. With all the buzz about what’s been going on with Amazon Web Services and what it means for the cloud, I couldn’t help but to think back to the last major cloud disruption that I experienced.
As a Salesforce admin, as in my life, I like to know every detail about everything. I’ve said it before, I’m all about the data. But so often we are left in black holes. How many times have you had a flight delayed & you can’t get a concrete answer out of anyone, and the airline’s website has more details than the person behind the counter? It’s incredibly frustrating. Why treat your customers like that?
So how did Salesforce react to their outages? Just weeks after the episodes, they launched trust.salesforce.com, giving the whole complete visibility to their system status. Not only did they show issues & disturbances, but average speed of transaction & upcoming maintenance notifications. Complete and total honesty leads to trust. Nothing can be perfect 100% of the time, but I certainly appreciate when a vendor respects me enough to be honest.
Oh – and 128 days until Dreamforce11!!