The Applicator

Talk to the typical SaaS executive about the complexities of customer service in Cloudland, and they give you a blank stare. What’s the problem. We provide our service. We guarantee it. We do a better job than

Well, yes. But that’s not all. When you’re getting cloud services, the services are often coming from multiple providers. Each of them can think they’re doing a good job or the right job. But even so, delivery can fail. And when that happens, it’s a nightmare for the customer. A nightmare.

Here’s a simple example. I have a Blackberry Pearl. My web site and domain name are hosted by XO. Two SaaS providers. I get my Blackberry e-mail from XO, which forwards it to the Blackberry domain name (tmo.xxx.com).

All of a sudden, this weekend, I started lots and lots of new spam–you know, the usual, sex stuff, plus a lot of spam with a Facebook return address, etc., etc., stuff that had been filtered. The new spam appears on both my Blackberry and in the e-mail delivered directly to my POP3 Mail account on my Mac. But much more new spam appears on my Blackberry.

Obviously, something happened to one or more of the spam filters that are provided to me. I know of at least two of these filters: one at XO and one on my Mac. Is there another one at RIM? Who knows.

I’d like it to stop, but I don’t have the time to troubleshoot this problem. Did XO change its forwarding policy? Did RIM install a new filter and screw up? Who knows.

If I just had one provider, I’d have some chance of solving it. But when I have two, I just have to sit and wait. The worst of it is, it might be the case that neither provider will ever realize that there’s a problem.

I wonder if the iPhone has a spam filter on it?

The point? Well, cloud service providers need to start thinking about this–and taking responsibility for the actual delivery of services, not just for making those services available.