Salesforce.com tackles scheduled downtime with its ‘five-minute upgrade’
No one likes it when their favorite online service goes down, even if it’s for scheduled maintenance or upgrades. That’s especially true when there’s money at stake, as it is for users of Salesforce.com’s sales or customer service software. So the company says it’s rolling out a new service called the “five-minute upgrade,” which shrinks scheduled downtime to a tiny window.
Salesforce’s Senior Vice President of Product Management Alex Dayon says the company normally upgrades its online applications three times a year, and during that period customers can’t access the service for between two and five hours. Going down for that long can be frustrating, especially on the customer service side.
“More and more services are being driven online, and there’s no night on the Internet,” Dayon says.
Contrary to the name, the five-minute upgrade isn’t about speeding up the process. Instead, Salesforce has developed a way to give customers access to their applications and data as it’s upgrading, except for that five-minute window. Right now, you can only view your applications, not enter any changes, but that brings you closer to business-as-usual — if you’re answering a customer service email, at least you can look up the information you need on Salesforce. And Dayon says the eventual goal is to be able to save new information as well.
Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris first revealed he was working to cut back on downtime last month. It’s being tested initially with users of Service Cloud 2, which helps companies find and answer customer service queries throughout the web, including Facebook and Twitter. Dayon says Salesforce will eventually bring similar availability to all its applications.
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.