Appirio tallies the technical debt in your Salesforce instance

ZDNet

...Today, cloud integrator Appirio is unveiling a tool that for the first time allows Salesforce customers to quantify the technical debt built into their instances. Cloud Metrics is an automated test that uses OAuth credentials to access a Salesforce.com instance and compare it to Appirio's database of over 1,000 Salesforce implementations it has worked on. The tool generates a report that compares what it finds to the norms in its database, highlighting areas where the instance has become more complex or cumbersome than it probably needs to be. The basic tool is free at launch, and Appirio offers a paid service to assess and map out a plan for eliminating the debt. Whether the customer does so will depend on the business impact of the debt when set against other priorities.

"We think about, is it worth paying down that technical debt now? How that plays out is very situationally dependent," Appirio's chief strategy officer Narinder Singh explained to me in a pre-briefing late last week. "By running our tool, you can count your technical debt. [We give you] a path that shows you where you're at, where you're going and lets you take corrective action where appropriate...