"The recent outages have caused my company to start looking for alternative CRM solutions unless Salesforce.com is able to stabilize their systems, and fast," said Jason Ellis, a customer support engineer at Applied Computer Solutions.

The company relies on the Salesforce.com service for both sales and customer support. "Being down a few minutes can be tolerated, but outages that can last 30 or more minutes can seriously impact our ability to perform our job functions," he said. "This can have a serious impact on our customer's perceptions of our company and our ability to provide them support," Ellis said.

"Clearly something is not right in Salesforce land," said Tom Kramer, president of Bella Pictures, a San Francisco-based wedding photography company that relies heavily on the service. Kramer seemed to be somewhat upset over the outage last Thursday, saying his company suffered from reduced productivity. Additionally, he said, Salesforce.com never contacted Bella Pictures to inform him of the outage. Kramer said the company seemed to be facing problems beyond anything connected with its switchover to the new Mirrorforce infrastructure.

Another customer, meanwhile, had a different experience. For staff at Phoenix Technologies Ltd., the Thursday outage "was not a significant problem," said Clifford Bell, the company's CIO. Milpitas, Calif.-based Phoenix makes applications and tools for the core systems of PCs and other devices, and it runs Salesforce.com for sales and marketing operations. After the crash, Bell said he spoke to Salesforce.com executives and received a written response directly from Benioff that detailed future plans to ensure that the outages would cease.

"Funny, but I never have gotten an e-mail from Larry Ellison for any Oracle issues or from Bill Gates when there are Microsoft issues," he said. "Believe me, I do have bugs from Oracle and Microsoft." Salesforce.com is working hard to correct the problems, he said.