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Salesforce.com is an enterprise cloud computing company. Its CRM platform provides customers a tool to track the information of their own business, increase employee productivity, and maintain good relationships with their own customers, etc. Since Salesforce’s software is completely cloud-based, customers just simply log in and start using it without the help of IT experts. Also, being a completely online based system means that Salesforce relies heavily on the Internet, therefore, problems related to the Internet could make a great impact on the business.

The issue of loss of connectivity has been repeating in Salesforce since the foundation in 1999. Although Salesforce has worked hard to mitigate this issue, it still affects a lot of people when the problem occurs because Salesforce has a growing number of customers. One recent catastrophe Salesforce suffered was the outage of the North American 14 site in May 2016. According to the news, Salesforce’s site went down for the whole day, making its customers could not perform their jobs for a full day, to make it worse, Salesforce’s customers lost the CRM data in the outage. Many of the customers who suffered from this outage and service disruption vented their frustrations and complaints via Twitter or other social media sites. Some customers complained the non-operating system limited the communications among their businesses; some complained that they could not access to their job because of the lack of the instant CRM information; others even wanted to switch back to the old-fashioned rolodex to store their business contact information. Even though Salesforce’s IT team worked on resolving the issue, customers were not satisfied with the responds from Salesforce. Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff went to Twitter to provide his email address, trying to calm the public. However, customers criticized the lack of transparency in the process of fixing the system, and all they want was to have their data fixed.

Although Salesforce.com has gained a competitive advantage in the marketplace, the persisting of the outage issue would influence the company. On one hand, the issue of the loss of onnectivity would undermine the confidence levels of customers. Customers need a trustworthy cloud computing company to help increase the performance of their businesses. If this issue remains, customers may probably seek out other CRM alternatives to equip their businesses. On the other hand, the technology issue may also undermine the reputation and the brand of the company. Furthermore, it may also affect the stock price and the economic performance of the company.

For solving the issue 1 problem, there are some solutions. The first one is to use “The Wave Analytics Cloud”, which is a massive product and a strategic shift for Salesforce.com. “Wave Analytics” is not just business intelligence - it is an application suite dedicated to sales, service, and marketing. The entire organization can immediately get important answers and start making data-driven decisions. “Wave Analytics” will change the way that companies use analytics and make every employee's effort more valuable. And the suggestion for customers is that they should upgrade from residential to business class quality bandwidth. When a network (such as Salesforce) is slow, many companies think they should invest more bandwidth. This is a real problem, but before upgrading their office bandwidth, they should see if they really hampered their Salesforce performance. Many companies are upgrading from residential to business class bandwidth because there are opportunities to ensure more stringent tolerances, better devices and fewer network applications.

For the slow system problem, our suggestion is that Salesforce.com should upgrade and build more the servers for customers. According to Salesforce.com, it runs on only about 1,000 servers, but the problem is that Salesforce.com has more than 55,000 enterprise customers, 1.5 million individual subscribers, 30 million lines of third-party code, and hundreds of terabytes of data all running on 1,000 machines. If Salesforce.com still runs only 1,000 servers, it will make customers loss money and time. And the recommendation is that Salesforce.com should use DNS (Domain Name Resolution) server. DNS is a technology standard for managing names of public Web sites and other Internet domains. Also, there are many benefits of DNS, such as: Capable of providing security; Errors are automatically checked; Easy of using; Flexibility; and Easy to maintain. For example, Google is also using DNS servers to provide a better and faster service to customers.