The hosted CRM vendor suffered a series of disruptions in December, January and February, leaving customers unable to access its applications. But the users interviewed last week said that the technology now seems to be stable.

"They took immediate steps to remedy the situation," said Chad Rycenga, an IT director at Charter Communications Inc. in St. Louis. Rycenga said the outages were hindering the company's ability to manage its call center operations. But, he added, the service glitches have stopped.

"The service is at reliable levels," said Tom Kramer, president of Bella Pictures. In a February interview, Kramer said an outage had hurt productivity at the wedding photography company, and he complained that Salesforce.com hadn't notified him of the disruption. Now his wireless network and Digital Subscriber Line service probably have more downtime than Salesforce.com's system does, he said last week.

During the first quarter, Salesforce.com went live with Mirrorforce, a set of three redundant data centers designed to help balance server workloads and prevent system crashes. It cost about US$50 million to set up, Salesforce.com officials said.

Following the outages, the firm also launched a Web site, http://trust.salesforce.com, that monitors its system performance and gives users status updates.