Salesforce.com: The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

Authors
Delaney, B., Lechova, M., Zhang, O., O'Rourke, J.S. (Editor)
Region
North America
Topic
Strategy & General Management
Length
9 pages
Keywords
software
customer service management
disruption
crisis management
Public Relations
Copyright Holder
Notre Dame
Student Price
$4.00
Target Audience
Graduate Students
Undergraduate Students

Salesforce.com is the leading company in the Software-as-a-Service Customer Relationship Management industry. On January 6, 2009, the company faced its most significant disruption in its history: more than 177 million business transactions were suspended. In addition, Salesforce’s service status dashboard was down, leaving its users completely in the dark. While the company remained silent regarding the cause of the outage, customers became increasingly frustrated.

Learning Outcomes
  1. To demonstrate the problems the SaaS CRM industry faces today and the impact of service outages on the company’s profitability and the industry’s reputation;
  2. To provide an example of how the lack of transparent communications between SaaS users and SaaS providers escalates to conflicts;
  3. To emphasize the importance of social networks in business management and the different uses for those channels;
  4. To explain the development of the SaaS CRM industry and how the emerging standards will shape this new technological industry and its participants