* BT Americas' SLAs include performance guarantees for specific apps
BT Americas, a top-tier global ISP, will launch at the end of November a service-level agreement that includes performance guarantees for specific applications that BT runs for its corporate customers, company officials have revealed to the ISP News Report.
The offering will be called Applications-Assured SLAs, and will apply to applications that BT is building into its Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network. Such applications include messaging, audio conferencing and video conferencing.
“A lot of our customers care less about the network itself and more about how the applications are running on the network,” explains Kevin Moss, general manager of product management at BT Americas. “We’re tackling that in a couple ways. One is putting the applications on the network. If we’re running the application for them, we can guarantee the performance of the application.”
BT also offers what it calls an Applications-Assured Infrastructure for critical business applications, such as SAP or Oracle, which it doesn’t run for customers. In these situations, BT will put probes into the customer’s network to measure application performance as well as network performance.
“The way it will work is the probe will effectively act as a robot. It will set up test transactions and measure the performance of those transactions,” Moss says. “We will define metrics that we will guarantee for the transactions.”
BT’s Applications-Assured SLAs are an extension of BT’s Applications-Assured Infrastructure strategy. BT also offers full outsourcing of corporate networks and applications for such customers as Unilever.
BT says it is one of the first ISPs to create a standard product around performance guarantees for network applications. Moss says BT has been providing application-oriented SLAs for some customers on a custom basis.
“What standardizing does is make this capability available at a price and at an ease of provisioning that makes it easy for our customers to order it,” Moss says. Application-oriented SLAs will “now become much more accessible to a broader range of our customers.”
Moss says BT’s vision is to offer a full suite of SLAs so customers can choose how much of their network infrastructure they want BT to be responsible for and how much they want to retain responsibility for themselves.
“We have a range of customers with some looking at the network SLAs and some customers wanting us to manage the SLAs and some who want us to carry part of the SLAs,” Moss says. “We’re finding that customers want to move up the value chain more and more.”
BT plans to announce its Applications-Assured SLAs on Nov. 30.
Read more about BT’s network SLAs in our next issue.
