Avoiding the pitfalls of SLA Management: A lesson for SaaS Providers

Service Level Agreement (SLA) management is a challenging part of delivering business critical applications over the Internet. The development of a successul SLA requires Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to do three things incredibly well:

1) Effectively define, mointor and report on key service deliverables.

2) Engage in sound risk analysis

3) Balance the conflicting demands of different clients against the need for consistency.

Tenzing's CTO Kelly Beardmore has written a complete white paper on SLA Management, entitled - Avoiding the pitfalls of SLA Management: A lesson for SaaS Providers. You've just read the opening paragraph. The complete whitepaper can be found on the Tenzing site at http://www.tenzing.com/resource-center.asp

At Tenzing, we have worked with many ISV's that have expanded their business through the delivery of their software through a hosted model. We've helped them re-architect their environments to handle substantial growth and ensure they meet the SLAs seemingly imposed on them by their enterprise accounts.

We have worked with many small software companies, that are in turn providing business critical applications to true Fortune 500 enterprise companies with well known brands. In many cases, when these software companies were much smaller, the SLAs were not seen as critical. Fast forward to present day - these companies are wildly successful, revenue is growing at tremendous rates, the services provided to their enterpise accounts is critical - measured in absolute dollars and percentage of revenue and profits - and SLA's suddenly carry big penalties for missing.

We're working with more and more ISV's to proactively manage SLA's.

If you're wrestling with SLA management, we would love a chance to dialogue with you. We've seen it before and we might be able to help you.

If you would like to weigh in with your comments, please post one or contact me.

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