NaviSite to Offer Service Level Tracking

In the increasingly cut-throat Internet services market, the ability to prove service levels is one of the most important things customers look for when choosing a provider. In that vein, Web hoster NaviSite Inc. will announce a new metrics tracking feature next week.

Starting with the past four months of data, NaviSite will publish its meantime-to-notify, meantime-to-respond, and overall site availability metrics on its Web site, free of charge each month, said Kevin Lo, vice president of products, services, and business development at the Andover, Mass., company.

"Weve been tracing these numbers for about 18 months now...One of the things thats become pretty apparent to us [is that] CIOs want accountability," he said.

NaviSite will gradually make other metrics public; the company tracks about 50 in total, he said. Other examples include proactive support tickets and back-up time cycles, he said.

"What people are really paying for is your ability to get it right the first time," Lo said. "Its either up or its down. Im under no illusions that you could go to other providers and get the same level of operation [but] the numbers will be audited by a third-party firm."

"Its certainly a step in the right direction to try to make more information available," said industry analyst Kneko Burney, of Cahners In-Stat Group, in Scottsdale, Ariz. But, she cautioned, NaviSite needs to live up to its performance numbers. "It sounds like to me theyre making the assumption that their QoS is so good...or else they have no idea. There is certainly that risk going down this path, they will be very exposed."

NaviSite uses tools from BMC Software Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle Corp., and Remedy Corp., to measure the performance of the roughly 3,000 servers and 280 customers, Lo said.