Everyone by now knows that Skype is/was out for a significant number of users today.
Perfect timing to look at the one problem with moving to a SaaS platform (and Skype – by my internal definition is SaaS/s). Imagine an enterprise that communicates by VoIP, accounts by SaaS, runs its salesforce through.. salesforce, and manufactures using SaaS ERP. When the lines go down….ouch.
Sure this is no different to the industrial age and the steam boilers running out of coal, or a decade ago and the car plant having a power outage. But then again it kind of is – almost all of what we do now relies on a copper (or fibre) communication path. If that path is severed bad stuff happens.
I know, I know the Skype outage was an internal software issue and not related to the communication channel per se, and I know, I know that in the old days the winds blew, the telephone lines came down and users were out for days and weeks – but the reliance has increased in the past few years.
I’m still sold on SaaS and the new communications paradigm, but as Rod would so conveniently point out, infrastructure is now more important than it’s ever been previously – when there is a lag between levels of reliance on infrastructure, and the efficacy and reliability of that infrastructure…. well that’s were tension starts to become evident.
Just when many of people are dumping landlines and companies are moving to go all SaaS It does make one wonder what happens in an emergency. The only phones that often work when something happens is the good old landline.