8×8 announced it is offering a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to qualified enterprise customers that guarantees service availability and voice call quality. The 8×8 SLA, branded as “Performance Assured” guarantees 99.99% uptime or better. The SLA also guarantees call quality as measured by a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of greater than or equal to 3.0 for at least 98% of all calls carried over the network. MoS scores are even guaranteed when using voice compression standards such as G.729a that can be subject to “less than toll quality” scores.
To prepare for the SLA offer, 8×8 spent years of internal service and feature utilization analysis to assure the guaranteed levels could be met. 8×8’s SLA guarantees end-to-end VoIP service uptime, reliability and call quality over any underlying broadband network including the public Internet, an MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) network or a dual MPLS/public Internet connection. To qualify for the SLA, users must secure their Internet access using dual routes in the event that one route fails. For now, the SLA is only available for locations in the United States.
8×8 customers can use the company’s Virtual Office Analytics “Service Quality” to view individual call and consolidated MOS score detail, providing administrators the ability to manage and isolate any network issues that may be impacting call quality.
Commenting in a statement on the SLA, Diane Myers, principal analyst at Infonetics Research (a part of IHS Inc) said, “The ability to deliver and guarantee enterprise grade service availability and voice quality normally reserved for private connections reinforces 8×8’s position as a market leader. This assurance that 8×8’s hosted PBX and unified communications solution meets the quality and reliability requirements of customers, while at the same time delivering valuable benefits, will go a long way in supporting 8×8’s push into the midmarket and enterprise segment.”
Mehdi Salour, Senior Vice President of Network Operations and Support at 8×8 added that his company “has invested significant engineering and operations resources to perfect the delivery of VoIP over the public Internet. The technologies we have invented and the relentless effort we have made to measure availability and service quality for every call have given us the data we need to provide our customers with this new service level agreement.”
8×8 provides cloud-based unified communications and virtual contact center solutions to more than 40,000 businesses operating in over 40 countries across six continents.
