February 13th, 2006
We never actually thought of hosting our application on our own servers. And never (in the last 14 months) had no server-caused outage so far. (Keeping my fingers crossed).
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Salesforce.com’s hiccups:Salesforce’s outages raise another issue as well - one that will play a critical role in determining the structure of the enterprise IT business in the years ahead. Salesforce has chosen to maintain its own computing infrastructure privately. It not only develops, sells, and services the application, but it owns and maintains the server and storage hardware on which the application runs. It recently invested, in fact, in building two major new data centers. Other SaaS providers, including Salesforce competitor RightNow Technologies, have taken a different route. They don’t own and maintain their own data centers but rather draw on the computing infrastructure of third-party utilities.Which route is the better one? It’s difficult to say definitively. But I think that in the end application utilities will be run separately from infrastructure utilities. They’re very different businesses after all, with the application business being innovation-intensive and the infrastructure business being capital-intensive. It’s hard for any company to be great at two different businesses simultaneously.
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