Salesforce Reacts To Outages With Status SiteSalesforce Reacts To Outages With Status Site

Salesforce.com on Tuesday debuted a service status Web site in response to outages that have plagued the on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) vendor.

The site, dubbed trust.salesforce.com, shows the real-time status of its key system components, as well as historical system performance information, incident reports, and maintenance schedules, said the San Francisco-based CRM company.

"The primary motivation for the site were the outages," confirmed Sandra Lo, a Salesforce.com spokesperson. "We wanted to give customers visibility about the service status."

While she denied that customers "demanded" a service availability display, Lo said that "this was inspired by customer feedback."

According to the site, Salesforce's NA1 component was offline twice in February: on Feb. 9, it was down for 81 minutes, while on Feb. 16, it was unavailable 62 minutes. (The second NA1 failure also brought down the vendor's SSL service for 7 minutes.)

Salesforce.com suffered several service interruptions earlier, including a six-hour downtime just before Christmas and a January stoppage for customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

After the January outage, Salesforce's chief executive Marc Benioff was quoted in news reports as saying "[Outages are] part of computing...nothing runs at 100 percent availability." Salesforce's new site will presumably prove that.

Trusted.salesforce.com is available immediately.