On May 19th 2016, a sequence of events perspired that would forever change the way customers view the Salesforce platform. Ok, that is a bit dramatic, nonetheless an outage occurred on the NA14 instance effecting millions of customers for well over 10 hours. But more significantly this was the first outage that resulted in data loss.
Root Cause
A detailed summary of the root cause can be found here. Below is a brief summary
- Power failure at the data centre caused by a faulty circuit breaker
- Database failure which were caused by a firmware bug that was exposed because of the efforts to restore the service
Failures happen, outages happen and bugs exist. Customers are using Salesforce for mission critical business processes so they are becoming more dependent on the platform.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. DF16 will be interesting this year, this is not a issue that can be brushed under the carpet. So will need to be addressed head on.
I think Salesforce will soon understand that the focus needs to shift back towards the tech and less about the sales and marketing. After all...
Within the community it is widely known that trust.salesforce.com is something of a joke. While its nice and glossy and gives new customers a warm fuzzy feeling when they see all lights are green, many developers feel that its just not accurate and in most cases out of date.
Why ? I am not really sure but one possible answer could that because Salesforce has become such a huge company that any messaging that goes on trust.salesforce.com needs to be approved by multiple departments.
Simply The Best...
Salesforce is the leader in the CRM space. The force.com platform is incredibly powerful, there is no doubt about that. But unless the focus shifts back to the technology, another technology company will become the de-facto CRM.
The tooling for developers needs to improve, there are still components of the salesforce platform that cannot be deployed programmatically. See full list here which in 2016 is ridiculous.
Salesforce is great and in in order for it to stay as the leader in CRM, it needs to stop selling and start building again.