* Equant refocuses its SLAs on real-world performance of key applications
As part of a companywide shift towards selling complete network solutions rather than bandwidth alone, Equant is revamping its service-level agreements to focus more on the real-world performance of key applications and less on backbone statistics.
Equant will continue to offer SLAs for individual network services such as IP VPN and frame relay, says Christophe Masiero, head of VPN Services at Equant. But Masiero says that in the future Equant will differentiate itself by offering broader SLAs with end-to-end guarantees and special measurements for applications such as VoIP.
“The SLA is an old-fashioned way of looking at network performance because it’s a stand-alone document,” Masiero says. “The SLA only deals with the network part, but we are looking at the services part, too.”
Equant isn’t the only ISP to update its SLAs to reflect changes in the corporate market for IP-based services. That’s why the ISP News Report is running a series of articles on the latest developments in SLAs among top-tier service providers.
Last week, we looked at recent moves by AT&T and MCI to offer more aggressive performance guarantees for IP services. This week, we’ll look at SLA plans underway at Equant and Infonet. Still to come are stories about the SLAs offered by Sprint, Internap and others. To read about AT&T and MCI’s SLAs, please check out the ISP News Report online archives (https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/isp/index.html).
For Equant, updating its SLAs goes hand-in-hand with efforts to create hybrid products that allow corporate customers to mix and match among its network services. In 2005, Equant will unveil a hybrid VPN offering that allows a company, for example, to purchase frame relay services in the U.S. and Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) services in Europe.
“What we want to offer is end-to-end SLAs for our hybrid networks,” says Jerome Raynaud, IP VPN Product Manager for Equant. “We want to move from SLAs by product line to…SLAs that reflect the networks of our customers.”
Equant executives say that its new SLAs will offer end-to-end performance guarantees for round-trip delays, availability and jitter. These guarantees will include LAN access as well as the backbone services such as frame relay or IP VPN, Raynaud says.
Equant also offers service-specific SLAs for applications such as VoIP.
“When we release our new SLAs, they will be available in 142 countries,” Masiero says. “It will not be a domestic [U.S.-oriented] announcement.”
Today, Equant like most ISPs has SLAs for each of its individual services such as frame relay and IP VPN. The company’s goal for a year from now is to offer a single contract that encompasses all of its network services.
“The SLA contract – you need to make it simple for the customer,” Masiero says. “What we want to have is a standard framework so we can address the needs of our customers…but it’s mandatory for Equant to be flexible to negotiate the SLA.”
To learn more about Equant’s SLAs, visit: https://www.equant.com/content/xml/prod_serv_service_management.xml
Key to the success of this series on SLAs is feedback from you. What do you care about most when evaluating SLAs? Which ISP is the easiest or most difficult to negotiate with on SLAs? Whose SLAs are the simplest or most difficult to understand? Please share your SLA stories with other network executives. Send us an e-mail today at mailto:cmarsan@nww.com
