Future of Salesforce?

[ankush]

As more and more companies are moving from on premise to cloud based CRM packages, there is an ever increasing need of adding more servers and other IT infrastructure facilities for the smooth running of the services. Recently there have been more maintenance activities carried by Salesforce, the frequency is increasing at an alarming rate.Do you think that the companies like Salesforce and Other cloud based CRM solution providers have a backup plan or are they planning anything in future to manage this situation of rapid increase in Clients ? What can they do to manage the the large volume of data added with every single new client ?

[john]

I'm sure that like us here at Really Simple Systems Cloud CRM, Salesforce's technology is going through growing pains as user numbers and data storage grow relentlessly. And like us, this will be the first time that their engineers have had to work out how to scale a Cloud CRM system through multiple orders of magnitude year after year.
This kind of scaling has been done before by other companies that aren't application vendors: eBay, Amazon, Google, Facebook and here at Yahoo! have all gone through the same learning/pain barriers. So it is certainly do-able, the only questions being, as you ask, how much dislocation to customers is caused in the process.
There are two main architectural routes that cloud providers are taking. Companies like Salesforce and Amazon are building one very large instance of their service, and working out how to ensure that it never fails. We are taking the other route, building multiple instances and allocating users between them for load balancing. The first approach is intellectually purer and theoretically easier to maintain, but in practice if one component fails, or needs maintenance, the whole instance has goes off line (for 3 days, in Amazon EC2's last outage). The other way is more difficult to administer but provides for better resilience for outages (if one instance goes down we can switch everybody to the other instance) and we can do the same for maintenance at periods of low activity, such as over the week end.
The analogy is like having a bus versus a fleet of cars: putting all the passengers in a bus is easier and cheaper, but if the bus breaks down everyone is stuck. With lots of little cars, if one breaks down then the other cars can squeeze in a couple of extra passengers.
So answering your question, I'm sure that like us Salesforce are learning as they go along and will overcome their technical challenges, and personally I think that at some time they will have to move away from just having servers in one place to having more geographically dispersed systems, both for technical (latency) reasons as well as regulatory ones as many countries look to legislate on data privacy and compliance.

John Paterson
CEO
http://www.reallysimplesystems.com