He called on Salesforce.com to notify users of outages that could last more than 45 minutes so they can plan "alternative strategies."

Making amends

Kramer acknowledged that financial penalties for outages would limit Salesforce.com's incentive to sign up major clients, but he suggested that the company offer less-costly responses, such as free training, integration assistance or extra tickets to the Dreamforce user conference.

"At the very least, they could have acknowledged it, apologized and credited us a day's worth of downtime for every day that had outages," said Geoff Graham, president of GuildQuality Inc., an Atlanta-based producer of customer surveys for home builders and a former Salesforce.com customer.

GuildQuality switched from Salesforce.com to a rival hosted system from NetSuite Inc. last February for its targeted accounting and sales capabilities, not because of Salesforce.com outages.