The Case Against the $113.4 Million Software Upgrade

Posted on October 5, 2009 by Jeff Grosse in News, Upgrades | 13 Comments

Suppose 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.

Winter 08 Upgrade Coming November 2 to NA1 and NA5

Posted on October 3, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in News, Upgrades | 3 Comments

Ice cube The day is coming! I just got notified that NA1 and NA5 will be upgraded to Winter 08 on November 2. The maintenance window will be from 8:30 PM PDT to 1:30 AM PDT on November 3.

To see what features are coming in Winter 08, just go to the Idea Exchange and search on “Coming in Winter 08.” You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of these changes coming in Winter 08.

This is a very significant release and I really look forward to using it. As admin previews and release notes are available, I’ll post links to them as well.

UPDATE: NA2, NA3, NA4, and EU0 will be upgraded on November 9 and 10. (Thanks for the info Neal) You can get all the detailed times at http://trust.salesforce.com/.

That New Date Picker Keeps Getting Better

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Productivity, Upgrades | 1 Comment

Just when I thought the new Date Picker in Salesforce.com Summer 07 was super convenient, I learned of the shortcuts they put in. Nice!

Now when you click on a date field, you can type shortcuts to auto-fill the date. See some of these examples.

Examples
mm-dd = that month and day, this year
mm/dd = that month and day, this year
mm.dd = that month and day, this year
yes = yesterday
tod = today
tom = tomorrow
sun = next Sunday
mon = next Monday
tue = next Tuesday
etc.

Non-English (US) locale users, unfortunately, this shortcut feature is not in yet for your locale, but here is your chance to vote for it on Idea Exchange and make it happen sooner.

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, dojo, ajax, summer 07, crm, calendar

Sometimes Little Changes Make Me So Happy

Posted on July 17, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in Productivity, Upgrades | 2 Comments

It’s great when something that secretly annoys you is fixed, eliminated, or otherwise changed into something much better. That’s the way I feel about the new date picker coming out with the Summer 07 release of Salesforce next month.

It used to be that to pick a date on a date field, you had to click a button which launched a new browser window to pick the date you want. That will soon be no longer.

With Summer 07, you just click the date field and very quickly, right in place, on your same window, there’s a calendar for you to pick the date, and it is fast. Try clicking on the next and previous months and it keeps right up with you as fast as you can click. No more waiting for the window to refresh with another month. Even better, there’s a month dropdown as well as a year dropdown to quickly navigate to the exact month and year you want.

Kudos to the UI team that knew we were secretly annoyed by that old, archaic way.

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, summer 07, calendar, next generation

Summer 07 coming to NA1 on August 4; NA2 and NA3 on August 11

Posted on July 5, 2007 by Jeff Grosse in News, Upgrades | 2 Comments

UPDATE: NA2 and NA3 are being upgraded August 10 from 8 PM PDT until 1 AM. Thank you Lisa and Darcy for the info.

Summer_07 I got notice recently that my org of Salesforce, NA1, will be upgraded to the new Summer 07 release on August 3, from 8 PM PDT until 1 AM.

If you haven’t seen what’s coming yet in this release, here are some great resources to check out.

Overview
Feature details
Admin Preview (pdf)
Detailed Release Notes (pdf)

One of the greatest features Salesforce has added to the Release Notes is the Summary of Features and Impact on Salesforce users that you can find on page 3 (literal page 5). This helps administrators map out what change this upgrade will have on their users the next time they log in after the upgrade. Be sure to check that out. And to Salesforce, thank you very much for adding that feature in Spring 07!

I have accounts on NA2, NA3, and NA4 so when I hear about them being upgraded, I’ll let you know as well, but if you get word on any other dates first, please drop me an email.

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com, summer 07, upgrade