My earlier post on CRM SaaS start-up Capsule (see The perils of being a SaaS start-up) elicited the following response from a respected player in the UK SITS market (no names, no packdrill):
“I read with some sympathy your article on your CRM provider being unavailable, in your Hot Views newsletter this morning. We use Oracle CRM-On-Demand and I have been astonished to see them bring the whole system down for ‘planned maintenance’ all day, approx once a month – on a Friday!! As it happens, we hold our sales meeting on Friday. I still can’t believe that they can’t do this over the weekend. Indeed, why do they have to bring the system down at all? Shouldn’t this kind of system be regarded as mission-critical (with 99.99% uptime) these days?”
Shouldn’t it indeed!