RE: Ahoy, SLA boffins!

["Leigh Porter" <leigh.porter () ukbroadband com>]

Indeed, that's why some companies have contracts managers with experience of thieving gits who try to rip you off on 
SLAs. We indeed have been burned and so our contracts worth any money now have real good incentives for the vendors to 
come up with the goods and make what they sell us work. Even though, sometimes important stuff gets dropped because the 
vendor refuses to be bound by it, and then, we get screwed over it. 

--
Leigh



-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Sprunk [mailto:stephen () sprunk org]
Sent: Wed 7/29/2009 10:52 PM
To: JC Dill
Cc: North American Noise and Off-topic Gripes
Subject: Re: Ahoy, SLA boffins!
 
JC Dill wrote:
> William Herrin wrote:
> > The SLA's I've looked at promise me that if their service is hard
> > down for a week (with no ambiguity whatsoever) they'll credit my bill
> > for upwards of 2% of the $50k/year or so I spend on the Internet
> > connection for my mutli-million dollar online service. 
>
> I'm really surprised anyone considers this an SLA, or anything special
> in a business contract.  I automatically expect to get a credit of
> 1.923% if the service were not provided for a period of 168 hours, no
> questions asked and no SLA required.
>
> When service is simply not provided, there's nothing special about not
> having to pay for it.

Read your contract closely and you'll find that, except for an explicit
SLA clause (which will cost you extra), they make no guarantee that the
circuit will work at all and you'll still owe them money.  On top of
that, the SLA payouts are usually capped at an amount _less_ than the
price increase due to demanding an SLA.  If your circuit costs $2k/mo,
and it's down for an entire month, you'll probably still owe them at
least $1500 for that non-service -- and you could buy a non-SLA service
for the same $1500/mo.

(Savvy customers who are spending big bucks know how to negotiate these
terms to be more favorable, but most customers aren't savvy unless
they've already been burned by this.)

S

-- 
Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking