Some time back here on the CIO-Weblog we had an piece on the outage problem SalesForce.com was having, Well today I came across this entry at "the enterprise software observer" blog on what the root cause behind the problem was ....Surprise surprise..." ORACLE Database Cluster".

In a letter to Salesforce customers co-founder and Executive Vice President of Technology Parker Harris wrote:

"Some of our customers experienced intermittent service availability which was caused by a problem in our database cluster. This issue required Salesforce.com to restart each database instance in the cluster, resulting in a pause in service."

A little background - With the acquisition of first PeopleSoft and then Siebel Systems, Oracle jumped from being a minor player in the CRM market to becoming the biggest in terms of both revenue and seats deployed.In public, the two companies have squared off directly against one another. During an autumn conference call with investors Marc Benioff dismissed Oracle as a competitive threat saying:

"They have created a culture of acquisition instead of innovation. It's a lot easier just to write big checks than it is to innovate.... Now, the same thing that happened to PeopleSoft will happen to Siebel; it will die."

On Wednesday's Feburary 22nd quarterly conference call with investors, Saleforce executives are likely to be asked a lot of hard questions.

* What impact are the outages likely to have on Salesforce's rate of customer churn?
* Was it wise to be so heavily dependent on its principle competitor for key technology?···
* Would an open source solution like mySQL serve Salesforce better?
* What are the costs of converting likely to be?
* Can current technology sustain the company's 100% year-over-year growth?

Source: esofto: Database Problems behind Salesforce's WoesUpdate: There is a message from Marc Benioff on the site now: Your readers may be left with the impression that recent performance has been Oracle's fault. Not true. Our recent issues have been more about the new data center we have moved in to, and the surfacing of defects in a variety of vendor products including hardware and network technology We generally avoid talking about vendor issues publicly, and I am only naming Oracle in this communication because you call them out in your note, and I believe it was unfair and inaccurate. But let me emphasize that they have been very responsive and we are pleased with them. Most important, I believe our customers will be pleased with the results.

Salesforce.com, Oracle