Setting Expections in SaaS - the Service Level Agreement
The emergence of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model has necessitated
new relationships between the service provider and the consumer with
respect to service availability, service performance and response times. The
Service Level Agreement (SLA) has evolved to become a useful tool which
governs both service expectations and the consequences of failure to meet
these agreed upon metrics.
In the past, software providers rarely used SLAs. This is relatively new ground
for the software provider and their customers. After all, the typical scenario
has been: sell the product, package the product, deliver the product
(physically or electronically) and then it is up to the customer’s IT department
to implement the application and manage it. With the new SaaS model, the
SLA becomes a tool that offers protection for both the software provider and
their customers.
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