On many occasions in my prior life at Demon Internet we laughed sales
It's a great question. For an operator to offer such a contract, I would imagine these assumptions must hold true: 1) The operator has a profit motivation: to sell what you and others will buy 2) that you and others are willing to pay a premium for a service that includes consequential damages in the SLA over a service that does not 3) that consequential damages can be defined to mutual satisfaction 4) the operator has the ability to quantify what the premium should be (the statistics of reliability and service delivery economics) 5) Starting reliability plus the overhead burden of managing such an SLA is such that the calculated premium is both marketable and profitable I might have missed a few, but it's a start - Is this how you see the problem? Marc -----Original Message----- From: Peter Galbavy [mailto:peter.galbavy@knowtion.net] Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2001 6:32 AM To: Marc Pierrat; nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Automated DLR conflict detection You misunderstand. Which operators will offer this (backed by some underwritten insurance) in an effort to be better than the competition ? Peter ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marc Pierrat" <marc@sunchar.com> To: <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 6:50 PM Subject: RE: Automated DLR conflict detection people
out of meetings when they offered SLAs that were limited to the value of a months service. But, in the end *all* the salepeople offered the same deal. Until when SLAs come with a pay back greater than the cost of the contract, and in fact cover consequential losses, most service providers will treat the failure to deliver within the SLA as a risk associated with the service and not something more serious.
However: Would you (or anyone in the group) be willing to pay a premium for that, and how much is a "real" SLA, one covering consequential losses, worth to you? Marc Pierrat marc@sunchar.com www.sunchar.com