Because most of my personal and professional data is stored into Salesforce.com, I am connected to it more than twelve hours a day, five to six days a week. As a result, I can monitor in near real time most service disruptions that have been plaguing this great application over the last couple of months. If Bruce Daley is right, such disruptions might be related to scalability issues with the Oracle database, mainly because the entire Salesforce.com application is running off a single Oracle cluster. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but two recent moves from Salesforce.com make me think that they are getting serious about addressing such issues.

First, Bernard Pech recently joined Salesforce.com. Until recently, Bernard was CTO at Siebel and played a key role in developing a highly scalable architecture for a large collection of Siebel applications. I would expect him to play an equally important role in helping Salesforce.com devise an architecture that will take it from 250,000 users to 2.5M, or even 25M.

Second, Salesforce.com adopted a long-awaited transparency policy with respect to the communication of service performance in real time, through the newly released trust.salesforce.com. Transparency is a great way to build trust, and I expect this move from Salesforce.com to set a new standard for the Software as a Service industry at large. It also partially addresses a new issue I recorded into the Office 2.0 bug tracker, which is that online services can go down, and we have to learn to work around this simple fact.

It is important that Salesforce.com gets this one right, for its success will largely impact how customers perceive the Software as a Service model in general, and whether or not they can trust it as much as they trust their own IT departments for supporting mission-critical applications. The task at hand should not be underestimated, and even service providers with the most scalable infrastructure can become victim of their own success, as was recently illustrated with Google’s inability to keep up with demand for their newly released Google Page Creator. In that respect, anyone having an interest for the Software as a Service model has a vested interest in Salesforce.com’s success.

Many thanks to Jeff for pointing me to Bruce Daley’s excellent article.