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Service Level Agreements (SLA)

An SLA sets out what level of service availability is being promised and what make good you will get in case the stated service level is not met. Yawn! Who wants to read boring legalese? However, you will be surprised. Let me give you one recent example. I was negotiating with a leading regional data center for managing emails. Somewhere buried in the middle of the proposal was the SLA and in it were a few gems. How about "Intermittent downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted towards any downtime periods" or "There will be no more than twelve hours of scheduled downtime in a calendar month." Give me a break. Schelduled downtime of up to 12 hours a month for an email service? And if the mail is down for nine minutes after every two minutes, that will be fine? Wait. That is not all. "All burnouts are exclueded and shall be charged on actual." Excuse me! You burn your equipment for whatever reason and then want to charge the customers for it? Obviously, this service provider has some serious rework pending on their SLA contains. Give it a look once over before you sign on. At least the known devil is better than the unkown angel !

LOOK OUT FOR "OTHER CHARGES"

Many SaaS services run on a sign-on-and -start model. But many like email services have set up fees. But you also come across some fees that are let's say, unexpected. Take the case of LuitDox, a document management offering. You need to pay them in advance, either for six months or for a year. That may be okay. But every time you make a payment, there is a processing fee of $35!

will have their partners do some customization of the site to meet your exact requirements. But most customization quotes I have come across have been equal if not more than the annual charge for a small organization. (Such customization charges are of course open to negotiation)

INTERGRATION ISSUES : One of the problems with opting for multiple SaaS providers is the lack of integration across vendors. Your users will have to login to each of the services separately, using separate pass words and possibly user names. And you would have to create, delete and otherwise administer users at each service separately. It would have been nice if all services could acept logins using some thing like OpenID (www.openid.net) or and LDAP- based directory service like the Windows Active Directory Services (ADS), Until that happens, we are left with having to manage a different user name and password at each vendor.

WHEN YOU LEAVE : When you leave a service that you were using (and paying for), ensure that you have confirmation from them that your account has indeed been terminated and that you will no longer becharged. Else, you may have the unpleasant experience of your credit card being charged even when you are no longer using the service.

CAN YOU CONVERT YOUR VENDOR INTO A SaaS MODEL?

Finally, if you cannot find a hosted model, can you make your selected vendor offer a pay-as-you-use model? We were negotiating for the implementation of a new HR system. And the final question we had of the short listed vendor was whether he would implement it at a data center of his choice and manage it for us, against monthly payments instead of an up-front payment plus annual maintenance charges. The first reaction was one of incredulity. But a month of cajoling with an assurance of a three year contract and a year's payment as advance cheques helped them to agree to the deal. For us, a huge one-time payment got converted into more comfortable monthly payouts, and we did not have to bother about having to manage the backend. The funny part is that today, they sell a hosted model based around what we cajoled them into doing just for us, and I am not getting anything for the idea!