SaaS: Too Much of a Good Thing for Retailers?

Most SaaS vendors guarantee their service levels at 99.9 percent uptime. 99.9 percent availability translates into about 43 minutes of downtime per month. That's not a lot of time, but the more a SaaS app is used across the company and integrated, the more any interruption in service is magnified and compounded. These interruptions are like paper cuts (or tribbles), and they can add up fast. What if NetSuite slows when your accounting team is trying to close the quarter? Or when your direct sales agents are booking all their weekend trunk show orders in Salesforce.com? Or when you're launching your big holiday email campaign through Responsys?