Sendia Out an SOS

SaaS darling salesforce.com [CRM] has enjoyed a colorful few days...

On a positive note, CRM made its first acquisition as a public company, paying $15 million in cash for Sendia, the engine behind AppExchange Mobile. This move isn't very surprising as Sendia and salesforce are inextricably linked since 2004. Last year, Sendia announced Wireless SFA 2.0, which enabled the use of salesforce.com's apps on wireless devices. Furthermore, 100% of Sendia's 79 customers are also salesforce customers.

Sendia was founded in 2002 by Andy DeMari, Janine Bushman, Alex Klyce and Eric Forsberg. You may remember this group from ISOCOR, which was sold to Critical Path for $400+ mm in 2000.  Sendia received funding from Globespan and Mobius (congrats to Brad and his team) in December 2003. Alex Klyce, President and COO of Sendia, will join salesforce.com and head up the AppExchange Mobile division.

On a not-so-positive note, salesforce had yet another software outage. From the company's status page:

Detail	At 8:11am PDT, the NA1 instance experienced an intermittent service disruption that included performance degradation and an intermittent ability to login to the service. API transactions occurred without incident.
Root Cause	The root cause was a software patch affecting the cache server. The service was restored to full operations after removing the software patch, resetting the cache system configuration, and re-starting the cache servers. Changes to operational procedures have been made to protect the service from similar issues going forward.

While I continue to applaud salesforce.com for making its infrastructure transparent, outages like this really emphasize the downside of single instance, multi-tenant application models. When an SAP or Oracle instance goes haywire, it impacts that company and perhaps some of its customers and partners. When salesforce has an outage, it potentially cripples the sum total of its customer base. OUCH.

Note: At the time of this writing I, and/or funds I maintain discretionary control over, did not maintain a position [long or short] in salesforce.com [CRM] but did maintain long equity positions in SAP and ORCL.

crm sendia salesforce.com m&a mobile software woodrow saas brad feld

Comments

[Brad Feld]

Thanks Jason.