Event Summary
Intira
provides netsourcing -- outsourcing services for IT and network infrastructures
needed to support E-commerce applications. Intira has announced a comprehensive
collection of SLA's and the reporting tools necessary for customers to monitor
them. Intira will guarantee up to 99.95 percent uptime (4.38 hours of downtime
per year) for all aspects of the customer's operation, including data centers,
network, equipment and operating systems and related software. Intira says that
it is able to offer these guarantees because of its advanced architecture and
proactive automated monitoring. Intira does not manage or guarantee the customers
application. The Intira guarantee is that downtime resulting from network or
infrastructure failures will be compensated at the rate of one day's fees for
one hour of downtime.
Market
Impact
Other
netsourcers will have no choice but to follow Intira's lead. How long it will
take for them to bring their infrastructures to a point where they can offer
equivalent SLA's is anyone's guess. Ours is that it will take at least a year
before the majority of companies in this business have upgraded to where they
can make similar offerings, although some will no doubt be willing to gamble
by offering the SLA's now and upgrading later. We also predict that ASP's, some
of which host on Intira, will be pressured to offer some form of SLA within
the next two years.
User
Recommendations
We believe that there are many outsourcing companies that are technically capable
of achieving equivalent levels of service. But they may not be ready to guarantee
it, and may not yet be able to provide monitoring tools that will satisfy the
most hard-nosed auditors. On the other hand, Intira has put its feet quite close
to the fire, and is therefore likely to work just a bit harder to maintain uptime.
This makes them a firm that deserves serious consideration.
Until
others follow suit, you now have the opportunity to consider the cost of downtime
- which can run into millions of dollars rather quickly for high traffic E-commerce
sites - and how much you are willing to pay for a guarantee. Different guarantee
levels have different costs, since you may be paying for additional infrastructure
such as redundant hosts. As you compare different offerings you will certainly
want to make sure that Intira is on your long list.
There
will in time be more vendors making similar offers, which will result in lower
costs and hence more sites willing to pay for guaranteed SLA's. So the E-commerce
dream of true 365/24/7 availability may finally be realized. At least, until
a backhoe cuts the Internet backbone.