When portions of Salesforce.com went dark earlier today, The VAR Guy started to wonder: Will there ever be a Volvo-type company in the SaaS (software as a service) market? Will a SaaS company ever aggressively promote its safety and reliability? Or will occasional outages and painful crashes remain the norm for some SaaS companies and their customers? Before you answer consider several recent events…
Many of the leading SaaS and cloud providers, it seems, have suffered outages in recent weeks and months.
Dark Clouds
The hit-list includes:
- Salesforce.com’s January 8 4, 2010 outage, which impacted thousands of customers.
- An extended Blackberry smart phone service outage on Dec. 22, 2009.
- Rackspace experienced an outage on Dec. 18, 2009, though the company says it was limited.
- A brief Amazon Web Services data center outage on Dec. 10, 2009.
- A 30-minute Microsoft Bing outage in early December 2009.
- A multi-day Microsoft outage in December 2009 that impacted some VARs and resellers.
- A Microsoft-related Sidekick outage in October 2009 that has prompted lawsuits.
All those outages beg plenty of questions. But here’s a central one: If big, well-funded technology companies suffer outages, how can small VARs and MSPs (managed service providers) expect to deliver world-class SaaS reliability on their own?
Honk If You’re Reliable
Hmmm… The VAR Guy doesn’t have an answer to that riddle. But he does wonder: Will there ever be a Volvo in the SaaS market — a SaaS-centric company that builds its reputation around data safety, data reliability and customer protection?
In the auto industry, Volvo has built its brand around safety since around 1944. But in the SaaS market, branding around safety and reliability could be more difficult. All it would take is one outage to destroy brand equity built around reliabilty.
Don’t misread The VAR Guy: He built his own business on SaaS. And generally speaking, he trusts cloud computing. But he’s seeking an easier way to identify the most reliable SaaS companies in the industry. Is there a Volvo parked within the SaaS crowd?
Hmmm…
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maybe once the SaaS industry is really matured and ripened with many truly old players in the field.. there could be a volvo.
Priyanka: Agreed. This is going to take time. But even if a SaaS player offers unrivaled reliability, The VAR Guy wonders if that company will have enough confidence to actually market and brand around its reliability. It would be a risky but intriguing move…
-TVG
Are you future-telling, here? Someone should let Salesforce.com know that they’re going to have an outage on January 10! (see your first bullet point)
Travis: Thanks for keeping The VAR Guy honest. Outage date should have been Jan. 4, 2010. All fixed. Happy New Year 2011 (a little early).
-TVG
Didn’t I read on here last month that Intermedia was offering a 100% uptime guarentee? Does that put them in the running for the Volvo award, or do you think they just haven’t been put under the volume/pressures of some of the big sites, so it remains to be seen?
Jamie: The VAR Guy rather enjoyed your comment. You’re right. The VAR Guy did mention that Intermedia is offering a five-nines guarantee. So that puts them in the running for the Volvo SaaS award … assuming Volvo doesn’t sue The VAR Guy for trademark infringement…
-TVG
Volvo was sold to Ford and now they were just acquired by a Chinese company. Maybe safety is dead and sexy and sizzle are preferred by end users? With SAAS, just like on premise solutions crashes will happen.
I think unlike enterprise software regime, in SaaS space, size of the provider doesn’t matter. Quality, credibility and cost effectiveness will matter. So customers may not wait for a Volvo it seems!
Well, my comment may be a bit late to your post. I’m providing a SaaS service in Vietnam, and I have the same question. How can small companies like mine survive if we can not convince our customers about service reliability ? Not mention about other things like data security, 24/7 service, … which costs us a lot of money. In my customers’ perspective, it doesnt worth to save a little money and bring back more worries. Just wonder how SaaS business has developed in your country and hope to get some advices from all of you. Thanks.
Duong VT@9: Your comment — regardless of timing — always is welcomed. In North America, The VAR Guy is starting to see better and better SaaS and cloud reliability. A tip: Keep your eye on HostingCon, a conference that starts the week of July 18. There could be some news at that event about how small VARs can measure the reliability of their cloud and SaaS partners… Live coverage from HostingCon in a few days here on TheVARguy.com.
-TVG
Thanks for your info, I’ll check it. It seems to be a long road ahead for me.
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