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The Case Against the $113.4 Million Software Upgrade

Jeff Grosse | October 5, 2009
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CDSuppose 63,000 companies that use the same software decide to take part in the world’s largest mass software upgrade event.  They all wanted to take advantage of some the great new features made available in “Snowman 10″, the code-name given to this new release.  They divide themselves into two groups and agree that group A will upgrade on one Friday night and group B will upgrade the following Friday night.

All the companies realize that in order to make this upgrade happen, they’re going to have to plan ahead.  They’re going to need test servers, database space, project managers, network engineers, application administrators, data backups, and most of all, they’re all going to need time.  Time to setup, time to install, time to configure, time to test, time to backup, time to deploy, time to test, and time to celebrate the completion of a successful software upgrade.

For the sake of easy math, let’s only look at the cost of the upgrade weekend.  Let’s assume that each company will need 1.5 people for 12 hours on the weekend of the upgrade, pretty much equal to 18 man-hours.  Assuming an average wage of $100 per hour, each company will pay approximately $1,800 in labor that weekend.  That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

$1,800 x 63,000 companies = $113.4 million

Assuming a happy outcome and all the companies get upgraded with no glitches, everyone’s happy.  But what happens to that $1,800 price tag when something goes wrong?  It goes up like crazy and for most companies, they’ve got to scramble to get that software running again by Monday morning or somebody’s going to be updating their resume.

The point is, that upgrade would cost a lot of money.
By contrast……
Salesforce.com upgrades their applications 3 times a year.  Who takes responsibility for upgrading all their customers?  They do.  And amazingly enough, they do the upgrade in six hours on a Friday night.  Multi tenancy allows Salesforce to upgrade customers by the thousands and with very little service disruption.  Their customers can test the new applications about a month before the upgrade and know with the utmost of confidence that their applications will work after that upgrade.
My company was upgraded to Salesforce Winter 10 this past weekend and I have to say it’s always a joy to come into work on a Monday morning after a Salesforce upgrade and know each of the following:
  • Salesforce is up and running
  • I didn’t have to even lose a wink of sleep to get it that way
  • I didn’t have to employ a project staff to make the upgrade happen
  • We didn’t have to install O/S patches
  • We didn’t have to upgrade databases
  • We didn’t have to recompile any applications
  • We didn’t have to deploy any .war files
  • Salesforce provided me with a sandbox to try everything out ahead of time
  • It’s like Christmas when I’ve got new features to turn on and try out
  • Salesforce took care of the upgrade for me, regardless of whether I’m on Contact Manager Edition or Unlimited Edition of their applications
Congratulations Salesforce Infrastructure Team!  You’ve got half of us upgraded.  After next weekend we’ll all be on Winter 10.  Thank you for all you do to make upgrades inexpensive, worry-free, and frankly, a pleasure to go through.  That’s certainly not the way it is elsewhere in the legacy software market.
Author’s footnote
Sure, I know the numbers above are entirely unmeasurable, but for the sake of illustration, let’s just agree with the fact that any company wanting to get 63,000 of their customers upgraded is going to cost a lot of dough, regardless of whether many of those customers are large or small implementations.  Bottom line, it’s big math.
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Get Excited about Winter 10 – Best New Features

Jeff Grosse | September 11, 2009
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Winter 10Jeff Douglas provided a fantastic summary of some of the best features coming in the upcoming October release of Salesforce Winter 10.  It’s really worth a read.  Thanks for writing it Jeff.

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