The Infrastructure Conversation

Phil Wainewright updates us on the latest Salesforce.com outage. (Sidenote: Phil is an advisor to SaaScon, and will be presenting at the conference.) Phil's blog is a reminder of just how crucial one of the ongoing SaaScon conversations is: the infrastructure conversation.

This past year has seen several higher profile SaaS outages, and even some SaaS companies going public while admitting they have no redundancy plan to their data center. All of that mix of news should serve as plenty of fodder for both end-user companies and ISVs as they consider their options with regards to SaaS applications.

On then end-user side, it would serve enterprises well to understand exactly what SLAs surround the infrastructure that their SaaS applications providers applications are running on. While, on the ISV side, it is crucial that ISVs launching (or running) SaaS offerings know exactly how their infrastructure is being managed.

There are obviously a whole lot of infrastructure choices out there (the leaders will be at SaaScon), and the depth of this conversation is critical to SaaS living up to its promises of reliability and scalability. I know it will be a major point of discussion at the upcoming SaaScon.