The Tuesday before Christmas, a software problem with one of Salesforce.com's database clusters caused the CRM service to be intermittently unreachable by some customers for six hours. That incident was one of several outages in December at SaaS (software as a service) providers, causing some customers to question the viability of the "on-demand" software model.

"Click and wait, click and wait" is how customer Charlie Crystle described his experience with Salesforce.com. Crystle, the CEO of nonprofit fund-raising software maker Mission Research, took out a handful of Salesforce.com subscriptions earlier this year. Although full-blown outages like Tuesday's are rare, Crystle estimated that at least once per week the system slows to the point of being nearly unusable. He plans to switch to a homegrown, in-house sales management system.

This tuesday Salesforce.com Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said that his company has made significant infrastructure investments to support its most ambitious release yet.

Benioff spoke to IDG News Service after the formal debut of the Winter '06 release of the Salesforce.com service in San Francisco. The service has been updated with AppExchange, a Web services-based platform that allows software companies to offer their applications as hosted services integrated directly into Salesforce.com.

According to Benioff, AppExchange will provide an Internet-based operating system to enable what he calls "the business Web." The company modeled its new offering on the consumer Web, where companies such as Yahoo, Google, and eBay offer Web-based services that have become essential to the everyday life of consumers, he said during a presentation in San Francisco.

Source: 1, 2Prashanth RaiTag(s):Saas, Salesforce.com