Twitter For Transparency
A few weeks ago, I was part to a discussion with Frank Kenney from the Gartner Group. He was talking about the need of providing greater governance transparency with web services. He recollected the enormous backlash SalesForce.com experienced last year when their system went down for a long period of time. As a remedy, and as as way to regain lost client confidence, SalesForce created a new web site (trust.salesforce.com) focused on providing its clients with complete transparency on the state of its systems.
Frank commented that this approach not only enabled SalesForce to yet again set the standard on how Saas should be done, but it built significant goodwill with its clients. SalesForce clearly showed it had nothing to hide.
This issue is equally significant for Xignite as more and more clients run more and more mission-critical business process on our services. We have historically achieved great levels of availability. We have nothing to hide. This is why we are busy at work providing a similar functionality to our enterprise clients.
Meanwhile, I was wondering if we could not do something simple that would help our clients easily answer the “are you having problems right now?” question which we get once in a while when a client has a problem accessing our services. 99% of the time the problem has to do with configuration changes on their side but I don’t blame fir first wondering if the problem is with us.
Here comes Twitter. Can Twitter do to web service governance what it has done for individual: bring total transparency on the availability of our systems?
You be the judge. Our support pages now boast a twitter-powered System Status widget that provide 5 minutes reports on system availability. If our primary web service farms runs into problem then the status is instantly be updated.
The great thing about twitter is of course that it lets any of our clients subscribe to our twitter in case they want to be updated in real-time of any changes to our system. Now that’s transparency.
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