Service Delivery

Setting the Standard for On-Demand Services

One of the primary benefits of on-demand software is how easy and inexpensive it is to get started—there’s no hardware, software, or related infrastructure to purchase and maintain. Instead, customers simply choose a subscription level that matches their needs while their vendor takes care of everything else.

Everything else, of course, includes a vendor’s “service delivery”—the complex technologies and processes that protect each customer’s data from both physical loss and unauthorized use, guarantee that data is available around the clock and without delay, and ensure that the vendor can maintain acceptable service delivery as the customer’s user base, applications, and number of transactions grow.

With more than seven years experience in delivering highly available, secure, and scalable on-demand applications, no one knows more about on-demand service delivery than salesforce.com. We identified the following seven standards of on-demand service delivery (download the PDF). We live by these standards and we recommend you hold all of your on-demand service providers to these standards as well.

Customer Relationship Survey Result
Their top driver of customer satisfaction: Salesforce’s reliability

World-Class Security

Salesforce.com ensures that customer data is protected with physical security, data encryption, user authentication, application security, and more.

 

Trust and Transparency

Salesforce.com promises full transparency into performance and availability data. Detailed information and advance notice of maintenance activities are available to customers—and the public—a t http://trust.salesforce.com.

 

True Multitenancy

The key innovation that makes on-demand service delivery possible is a multitenant architecture, in which all users and applications share a single, common infrastructure and code base that is centrally maintained (like eBay or Google), maximizing performance and reliability and making upgrades a snap.

 

Proven Scale

The Force.com platform has successfully scaled as the salesforce.com customer base has grown. Today, we support 47,700 customers, over 575 applications, and more than three billion total transactions per quarter.

 

High Performance

Salesforce.com has a track record of fast application performance everywhere in the world, both for the delivery of Web pages and for transaction processing.

 

Complete Disaster Recovery

Seamless disaster recovery is made possible by our fully mirrored data centers. Maintaining a full-scale backup facility enables salesforce.com to deliver consistent performance and reliability even in the event of a regional disaster.

 

High Availability

Salesforce.com recently invested in three brand-new data centers to ensure the highest availability and service quality for our customers.

 
 

For details on the seven standards that salesforce.com believes should be required of any on-demand vendor, read our white paper, " The Seven Standards of Service Delivery."