AUSTIN, TX – CompATX, a global provider of enterprise computing systems, experienced a major failure of its on-premise customer relationship management (CRM) system this morning, according to Tweets from employees and conversations with other sources within the company.
In addition to stalling employee’s business development activities, the downtime has shaken the IT industry. Before now, there had never been a documented instance of an in-house server going down.
“Companies expect this kind of issue to happen in the cloud. But on-premise is supposed to be different – more secure, more reliable – it’s right there in front of you in the building,” said CompATX CTO Bill Cable, who was reached this morning.
Supporters quote security, control and peace-of-mind as key reasons for going with on-premise deployment, a model that has been in use for decades. With an on-premise system, IT has complete control over security and up-time.
Furthermore, proponents of on-premise computing claim that cloud solutions only provide 99.9% up-time. Recent downtime at Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s Google Apps seemed to confirm this statistic.
However, with today’s first documented on-premise failure, IT managers are left to ask, is nothing perfect in the realm of enterprise computing?
“The employees keep asking us what’s going on, but we don’t really know. We’ve never had problems before. Everything is plugged in. We thought we had everything under control,” said IT manager Jimmy Butts.
Meanwhile, another IT team member has been tweeting from the company’s data center:
With their contacts, campaigns, and pipeline information locked in the CRM system, sales and marketing team members are in an uproar.
“I probably shouldn’t be discussing this, but this isn’t the first crash we’ve had. It’s just the first one that’s been leaked. This system’s about as stable as Greek debt,” said one CompATX sales manager who asked to remain nameless since he is not authorized to speak to the press.
This incident has sparked a strong response from the analyst community as well. Previously concerned with recent downtime from cloud services, some analysts are now questioning the on-premise model.
“The truth remains that no system can guarantee 100% up-time. However, that’s what customers expect. An incident like this could give some customers pause in deciding between an on-premise system or cloud alternative,” says Ray Dang, CEO of Orion Research.
Lester McGee, CEO of CompATX, spoke adamantly during a 2010 talk at a local Rotary Club, saying, “I went to Harvard Business School in 1939. Back then, clouds were just puffs in the sky, and that’s all they are now. I don’t trust my business with something that’s floating around in the air,” says McGee.
At the time of publication, CompATX’s CRM system was still down.
The question remains: What’s next for on-premise? Was this an isolated incident or is the future of on-premise computing in jeopardy?
For more updates on the CompATX meltdown, follow their Twitter account @CompATX.
The companies and individuals named in this post are completely ficticious. This article is meant to be a satirical take on the general public's critique of cloud computing systems and was done as a follow-up to this post.
Thumbnail image created by dmitrybarsky.
