PAAS offerings have emerged as the modern solution to the changing nature of applications, increasing developer efficiency, while intelligently linking development frameworks and application services in an automated deployment environment, VMware said. PAAS solutions promise to let developers focus exclusively on writing applications, rather than configuring and patching systems, maintaining middleware and physical machines and worrying about network topologies.

Yesterday, Google announced that they have significantly reduced the Gmail downtime, setting a standard for public cloud services. Gmail was up 99.984 percent of time which means seven minutes of downtime per month over last year. In fact, this includes accumulation of small delays of few seconds which some of the users experienced and most of Gmail users didn’t even experience this downtime. However, it is a different story with on-premise email systems. According to Radicati Group, on-premise email had on an average 3.8 hours of downtime per month, making Gmail 32 times more reliable than the average email system and 46 times more than Microsoft Exchange on-premise.

Actually, Google is so confident of their architecture and its reliability that they are taking off the terms related to scheduled maintenance downtime that were earlier part of their SLA. This ensures that any Gmail downtime is counted as an unscheduled downtime, thereby, allowing the users to claim compensation under the SLA. Their confidence can also be seen from the fact that they have removed the 10 minute limit on the intermittent outages. Essentially, Google is saying that any Gmail outage is their mistake and they are willing to compensate their paid customers for it. Whether the compensation is comparable to any loss experienced by their customers is an altogether different debate with many nuances to be considered. It depends on the customers’ ability, based on their business needs, to convince Google to agree to an acceptable amount before they even sign any agreement. In short, smaller customers may get shortchanged while larger enterprises extract some levels of compensation. However, it is an altogether different topic to be considered separately.

DestinationCRM.com

Ben Martin of DesitnationCRM.com, one of my favorite industry pubs, has a great article up entitled “The 5 Realities of Customer Retention” that really struck a chord with me.

Martin posits that the power weilded by customers with relationship with your brand cannot be ignored. It’s hard to argue with that! Further, he gives us the following key points:

Today, every customer has the power to hurt or strengthen your brand through social media. Any news about your business — the good, the bad, and the ugly — now spreads like wildfire at the click of a button.

Here are five things you must do to retain customers and maximize the revenue potential they offer your business in today’s increasingly collaborative world.

1. Truly Change Into a Customer-Centric Organization
reshape and redefine your culture to focus on customer satisfaction and retention

2. Social Media — Don’t Hide from It, Harness It
Servicing your customers in the channel they prefer, from Facebook to the Web, builds loyalty and helps you keep the customers you have

3. Understand that Customer Service Is the New Marketing
a customer-centric organization focused on service and implementing customer feedback will generate more revenue and reduce traditional marketing spend by building brand loyalty in new channels

4. Run Service as a Profit Center, Not a Cost Center
Companies with the highest satisfaction and retention rates run their service centers as independent profit-and-loss units

5. Treat Every Customer as High-Value
Beyond social media, support availability through multiple communication channels translates to the delivery of effective, top-tier service. You’ll avoid brand damage while driving new customers all without adding headcount and escalating costs. This kind of process also nurtures customers to renew and sign on for new business. You may even recruit a new “Net Promoter” or collegial member of your online army of customer advocates.

If you haven’t checked out Google’s own intro video, you can do so right here:

I hope you’ll enjoy taking the journey with me.

Sincerely,

Nick Schoeneberger