Intuit’s major outage last week served as a harsh, yet valuable reminder for all of us about the serious risks which underlie our growing dependence on third-party, ‘cloud’-based services.

The irony about the timing of Intuit’s service failure is that the company has been escalating its marketing efforts to position it as a leading provider of cloud services. For instance, Intuit’s SVP/CTO, Tayloe Stansbury, was a keynote presenter at last month’s SIIA All About the Cloud Conference in San Francisco where he boasted about Intuit surpassing $1 billion in cloud-based service revenues.

The company’s CEO, Brad Smith, did a good job quickly apologizing to Intuit’s over 300,000 customers who were affected by the outage. His blogpost also explained the cause of the disruption and made a public commitment to put new policies and procedures in place to prevent the problem from occurring again.

Smith’s response was certainly better … Read More »

Salesforce.com gave its customers a belated New Year’s gift of unscheduled downtime yesterday, which extended into today in some regions, according to its Trust.Salesforce.com site.

While many of its corporate users might welcome a respite later in the year, most probably came back to work this week with the idea of pounding on their customer databases to generate new revenue opportunities to kickoff the new year. Being unable to access their online customer relationship management (CRM) system probably didn’t make them too happy.

So, will this service disruption derail Salesforce.com, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and broader cloud computing movement? Only if these isolated incidents evolve into an ongoing pattern of declining performance.

Occasional problems happen. Back in 2007, I predicted that the on-demand services market would continue to soar despite more severe service delivery problems at NaviSite that year, because customers were already becoming convinced they could get a better return on investment … Read More »