Salesforce, the CRM giant, has created a new C-suite role: Chief Availability Officer and appointed Darryn Dieken, who has worked with Salesforce as the Executive Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering.
Dieken remarked the somewhat squishy-sounding title by the San Francisco-based cloud company known for its flagship customer relationship management software is actually pretty literal. The newly-appointed CAO said it is all about making sure that the services of Salesforce are reliably up and running for customers.
Dieken remarked while individual Salesforce teams will still be accountable for availability, there was a need felt like this was an important enough role, where we needed to be one voice to our customer, one place where all these things came together. The Salesforce CAO further remarked it was needed so that we had a common voice, a common model for our customers to engage with us on.
An incident in May 2019 illustrated the importance of the issue when a technical glitch from the side of Salesforce kept customers from accessing Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, two of its most widely used services, for the better part of a day.
Before coming to Salesforce, Dieken held leadership roles at Microsoft for more than two decades with stints in most of the organization’s engineering teams.
In its annual report, the CRM giant remarked its growing use of third-party cloud platforms and other technology vendors adds to the risk. “As we increase our reliance on these third-party systems, our exposure to damage from service interruptions may increase,” the company said.
“Interruptions in our services may cause us to issue credits or pay penalties, cause customers to make warranty or other claims against us or to terminate their subscriptions and adversely affect our attrition rates and our ability to attract new customers, all of which would reduce our revenue. Our business would also be harmed if our customers and potential customers believe our services are unreliable.”
Last year, Salesforce shifted its Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure, and it also works closely with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.