SLAs: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

What's par for the course for the "service level" part of a service-level agreement from an Internet-infrastructure provider means different things to different people.

Whats par for the course for the "service level" part of a service-level agreement from an Internet-infrastructure provider means different things to different people. Or so says a report issued this week by Tier 1 Research, an Internet-infrastructure software-and-services research firm based in Minneapolis.

According to the report, titled "How Good is Good Enough," such companies, primarily managed service providers, were rated by several different metrics on how well their SLAs measured up. The highest ratings went to MSPs in four categories. Managed hoster Digex scored highest for security, InterNAP won for network performance, Loudcloud ranked highest for infrastructure uptime, and relative newcomer SevenSpace had the highest rating for customer satisfaction.

"We looked and found that there really wasnt anything out there analyzing SLAs for this market," says Andy Schroepfer, president of Tier 1. He explains that, "There are so many dirty secrets with SLAs," that customers need to focus on what aspects of a service, be it security or network uptime, mean the most to them.

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Survey participants included larger companies such as AT&T, Cable & Wireless, Exodus, as well as smaller providers such as Telenisus, Conxion and Rackspace.

Tier 1 also announced updated research for its "Web Hosting Bible" report last week. Among other findings, the company reported that it expects IBM Global Services to overtake Exodus as the market-share leader in the hosting market during this final quarter of 2001. This report will be available Dec.10, but the SLA findings are immediately available.

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