Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company—and Revolutionized an Industry

5.5. Play #56: Embrace Transparency and Build Trust

One of the biggest issues for any cloud computing company is ensuring reliability of the service. We had made massive efforts to ensure that our service would always be up, such as configuring our database to run on several different servers so that if one machine failed, the others would still work, yet in late 2005 our site went down. Customers quickly began to grumble that the service was unreliable. Making matters worse, a competitor signed up for a free trial as a way to ascertain when our service was down—and reported any problems to the press. Literally, within minutes, journalists would call seeking comment. Before long, salesforce.com's reliability issues were widely publicized, and ...