Gripeforce

Really bad timing...

2006-04-07T04:49:00.000-07:00

A day after Salesforce.com issued a press release touting a whole month with 99.99% uptime... They experienced a significant outage that resulted in intermittent access for over 3 hours.

Anxious to hear your thought or comments...

"Disinformation" Campaign

2006-03-23T16:38:00.000-08:00

I just received a post that I think you would all appreciate. Our friends over at ZDnet broke this one:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=138

Rest assured that salesforce uses the same type of documents against ALL their competitors, Entellium, Salesnet, SalesBoom, etc...

Comments welcome

The Dark Side of "The Force"

2006-03-10T07:23:00.000-08:00

I just came across this article and found it very interesting. Looks like Salesforce is nervous about potential competitors and is bullying them...

Salesboom Says Salesforce.com is Bullying Rivals: CRM's David vs. GoliathBusiness Wire
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060309005748&newsLang=en

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this...

A question of Anonymity...

2006-02-21T12:56:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I received this message from Bruce at "The Enterprise Software Observer" (If you have a few minutes he has a great blog at: http://www.esofto.com)

"Hey CRM Guy!
I was told you are really a competitor of salesforce.com. Is that true? Would you be willing to reveal who you work for, on a confidential or public basis, whichever works for you?
Thanks!
Bruce Daley
The Enterprise Software Observer
http://www.esofto.com
editor@esofto.com"

Sorry Bruce, no can do!... While it's not true, (playing devil's advocate for a moment) I guess you never really know, I could be a competitor… or I could be a Salesforce employee tired of all the lies (ooh the drama!)... maybe my real name is Larry Elison and I'm typing from the captain's chair of my yacht... or I could be from a big salesforce implementation and would be risking my employment if were to disclose my name or the name of my employer (the risk is real whether done in a private or public forum)...

Anonymity is the safer bet so, you be the judge…

New status site...

2006-02-16T11:05:00.000-08:00

Salesforce officially announced status.salesforce.com (you can also reach it at http://trust.salesforce.com/)...

The media has mixed reviews on this... some positive, some negative... My opinion is let's see what happens when there is another downtime incident...tell me what this page tells a VP of Sales when they can't access their CRM system?

"WOW, they seem to be processing a lot of transactions - whatever those are - and there's a yellow light. Okay, I guess now that I see this, I don't care they they are having an outage."

In my opinion - salesforce missed the mark on this. This page should be all about WHAT THEY WILL DO FROM A COMMUNICATION STANDPOINT WHEN AN OUTAGE OCCURS. Simply stating the system is up or down, really isn't enough -WE KNOW WHEN IT'S UP OR DOWN BECAUSE WE CAN'T LOG IN. What we really want to know is (1) what you are doing to solve the problem and (2) when any issues will be resolved.

I'm interested in hearing other opinions on this...

For everyone keeping score at home...

2006-02-09T14:46:00.000-08:00

SFDC is down, yet again... that's twice in the same day. Today's situation appeared to be resolved when all of the sudden... Down again!

We will keep you posted

PS: Still no word about the first outage... Don't expect to hear anything official to sometime tomorrow.

premium support/SFDC employee

2006-02-09T11:49:00.000-08:00

Could a Salesforce.com employee of premium support customers tell uswhen it will be back up and running?

IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN!!!!

2006-02-09T11:14:00.000-08:00

Down again... I have to say I am amazed! Apparently I am not the only one experiencing this as I have confirmation from several sources.

The photo above was taken at 11:15AM PST

Is this true???

2006-02-02T17:41:00.000-08:00

Just received this blog and since I am not a user of the team edition, I can not speak to it's validity... can anyone confirm if this is true???

"I was a Team edition customer for 1 year and it was great while I was using it. Toward the end of that year I asked to cancel my service. My request was processed...2 months later I tried to login to see if my account was cancelled. Through their sly contractual setup, when you login this constitutes access and therefore you are obligated to pay. I couldn't get out of it -- had to pay another year of service or risk collections.Now I haven't accessed it for over a year and I still get invoices. The thing is these are REALLY sly invoices -- there are links at the top to "log in" to check my account status, etc. However, lower down on the invoice it shows the amount and then shows "Paid in Full". Basically they are not sending me an invoice but trying to trick me into logging into the system so they can bill me again and argue that its part of the contract.These kind of tactics make me sick and despite my respect for the great system they have developed, I can no longer recommend them to any small business. "

Interesting comment from a contributor

2006-02-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Mohit Goyal said...
I was also given the run around by SFDC on the 30th. We've had service go down at *least* every Monday since Jan 9. They happily told me it was going back up at 11am PST Monday (ended up being 11:30am PST for us), but neglected until I called later to tell me the API was going to be down until 3pm PST.No proactive communcation sent. Had to wait for people to call/email me back.Monday they said they'd give us access to status.salesforce.com, but yesterday they reversed that decision.

Benioff Speaks about Outage, blames new data center

2006-02-02T10:19:00.000-08:00

Salesforce is blaming the recent outage on the new data center. I thought that was the plan to reduce downtime??

From eweek:

"Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said that ending the outages that have hit users of its Web-based CRM (customer relationship management) application service is a matter of "shaking out" the company's new $50 million data center."

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1917901,00.asp?kc=ewnws020206dtx1k0000599

Very interesting perspective from ZDNet

2006-02-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

From the article:
"My fear is that Salesforce.com doesn't have the excuse that it's relying on third-party software that's not up to the job (which to be frank is not much of an excuse anyway). My fear is that the company has not geared up to fulfil its responsibilities to know exactly what service levels its customers are experiencing, and to keep them informed when things go wrong."

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/index.php?p=104

G-Force in the news...

2006-02-01T11:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.crm-daily.com/story.xhtml?story_id=41350

http://news.com.com/Salesforce.com+users+lament+ongoing+outages/2100-1012_3-6033540.html?tag=cd.top

Also, please take a few minutes to check out some fellow gripe blogs:

http://www.billbither.com/

Another outage....

2006-01-30T11:54:00.000-08:00

This is starting to happen all to often. From 10:30 AM through lunch Salesforce was down. This is too much. Two days left in the month and the sales team can't access their data. It's amazing their marketing website never goes down... I guess it shows where they are spending all their money...

Another Salesforce.com Outage

2006-01-07T12:36:00.000-08:00

Another outage yesterday... for more information, click here:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=86

Wondering about the myserty database vendor?

2005-12-23T05:43:00.000-08:00

Here is the release announcing the engagement:

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2005_jul/salesforceonoraclegrid2.html

The mystery database bug...

2005-12-23T05:09:00.000-08:00

An eWeek article in which Salesforce blames the downtime on a mystery database bug...

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1904795,00.asp

Should be interesting to see if Oracle has any response to this... stay tuned...

UPDATED: Responding to other blogs...

2005-12-22T08:10:00.000-08:00

Chris Selland posted a blog earlier talking about the SFDC outage and the long and short of it is: no Big deal... See below

"Bottom line: I'm not making light of this - downtime is never good - but I also don't see this as a very big deal - unless it happens again, and repeatedly. As with Ebay a few years back, yesterday's events aren't something Salesforce can (or will) ignore - but I have little doubt they'll learn from it - and get better."
To read the entire blog, see below:
http://reservoirpartners.typepad.com/

I have to say, I appreciate where Chris is coming from, however, I don't think he has been using Salesforce for very long. If he had been using it for a while he would know, it has happened before and more often than he may believe. This is an all too common occurance for Salesforce. Yesterday just happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back from a media/PR standpoint. To see just how wide spread the downtime is visit this blog: http://charliecrystle.blogspot.com/2005/10/leaving-salesforcecom.html

It's simply a larger issue than people (outside their user base) believe.

UPDATE: See the links to this post... http://gripeforce.blogspot.com/2005/12/i-hate-salesforcecom.html#links

FINALLY, Salesforce.com speaks...

2005-12-21T18:39:00.000-08:00

After a day of waiting, Salesforce.com provides an update on yesterday's outage. Amazing that is TOOK A DAY to respond to their customers... BTW, isn't the "database vendor" Oracle? Should be interesting to hear Larry Ellison's take on this...

"On Tuesday December 20th, some salesforce.com users experienced intermittent access (between approximately 9:30 am and 12:41 pm ET & 2:00 pm and 4:45 pm ET) on one of the company’s four global nodes. The root cause of the intermittent access was an error in the database cluster. Salesforce.com addressed the issue with the database vendor. By Tuesday afternoon EST, the system was running normally for all users.
All four global nodes are currently operational and running normally. There are no outstanding issues in the system at this time. No other aspects of the system were involved.
We apologize to any customer who was inconvenienced."

Gripeforce gets a mention on ZDNet

2005-12-21T12:12:00.000-08:00

Check it out for yourself:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=78

The street concerned about Salesforce.com

2005-12-21T11:35:00.000-08:00

From Business Week:

"We are told the outage impacted a majority of customers, as well as restricting the company's own access to the system. Customers were completely unable to log in and use the system to access customer data. We are aware of multiple customers that are quite displeased with the outage," First Albany Capital analyst Mark Murphy wrote in a research note. "We believe this is the most severe and widespread outage Salesforce.com has experienced. It would not surprise us if Salesforce.com's competitors get hold of this news and try to use it to their advantage."

Full article: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8EKQJO00.htm?campaign_id=apn_tech_down&chan=tc

A post from SFDC - "Keep your offline synched"

2005-12-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

This is from their site... still no mention of the outage...

http://blog.crmsuccess.com/crmsuccess/2005/12/keep_offline_ed.html

More Salesforce.com articles and posts...

2005-12-21T08:38:00.000-08:00

Maybe the media isn't as behind on this story as I thought...

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/12/20/HNsalesforceoutage_1.html

http://charliecrystle.blogspot.com/2005/12/salesfarce-and-us-unhappy-after-all.html

http://www.salesforcewatch.com/2005/12/salesforce_down.html
Note the part below: "As expected, 'daroz' comes through with a post over on the CRMSuccess forums (Salesforce customers only) before Salesforce themselves.” Not letting customers know about the issues is terrible from a customer service standpoint.

Also, found a vendor who share the same distaste for Salesforce: http://www.salesnet.com/nobull

Other Anti-Salesforce Bloggers... we are not alone!

2005-12-21T06:50:00.000-08:00

http://charliecrystle.blogspot.com/2005/12/dog-food-vs-salesforce.html#comments

Salesforce outage... articles and comments

2005-12-21T06:45:00.000-08:00

I was able to find a couple of articles covering yesterday's day long outage.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=77

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1308986078;fp;16;fpid;0

Still unbelievable to me that the press has not been all over this. Considering the amount of lost productivity yesterday resulting from ALMOST A FULL DAY OF DOWNTIME you would think this would be a bigger story in the technology community.

SALESFORCE.COM DOWN AGAIN!

2005-12-20T12:45:00.000-08:00

I can't believe these guys are down again! All day now - since 9:00AM we have been unable to login. ALL OUR SALES DATA IS TRAPPED IN THERE!!! How are we suppossed to productive when the site is ALWAYS DOWN!!!!

I hate Salesforce.com...

2005-12-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

I have started this blog as a forum for other disgruntled users of Salesforce.com!

I am sick of all the downtime, tired of the arrogant sales people (I feel like CS only contacts me when they want to sell more licenses), and if I never hear or see another interview with Marc Benioff again, it will be too soon.

Last week I noticed they (SFDC) released a new "sandbox" which users can sign for to the tune of $25 p/head. What a scam! Other CRM vendors have had the same thing for years - FOR FREE!!! This is another way they want to exploit me for more money. And the fact the media picked up with little-or-no research is unbelievable...