Seek a strong SLA from provider.

An e-business outsourcing provider promotes a blossoming business.

OnlineChoice.com and FTD.com needed to outsource the services required to run their business to-consumer e-businesses, while also supporting growth. OnlineChoice.com allows consumers

nationwide to maximize their buying power by joining free, no-obligation buying pools to get lower rates on vital services, such as electricity, natural gas, and long-distance telephone service. FTD.com is the online floral and specialty gifts operation of FTD, the world's largest floral services organization.

When OnlineChoice.com launched the first of its group-buying services last year, the company was outsourcing its Web-hosting needs to a local, regional provider. OnlineChoice.com already has 110,000 buying-pool members across the United States. The company expects a significant increase in Web site traffic, resulting from aggressive nationwide advertising and marketing and the launch of new group-buying services, such as InsuranceChoice and InternetChoice.

FTD.com's online site was originally deployed with the help of a Web-hosting firm, which had managed the Web site at a data center operated by a co-location provider. FTD is relaunching FTD.com with the aggressive goal of boosting online sales from $50 million to $90 million within one year, while continuing the online service's reputation for high-quality floral and gift orders with same-day turnaround.

Both dot-com companies had the same need--to find an outsourcing provider who could quickly deliver and, over time, scale for growth the networking and IT infrastructure and resources required to run their e-business applications with maximum uptime availability. After evaluating a number of high-profile outsourcing vendors, both companies chose Intira Corp.

Both companies also were aware that when their mission-critical e-business applications were not available to their online customers during that application downtime, they were essentially out of business. The right service-level agreement (SLA) from the right outsourcing infrastructure provider was an essential requirement, letting them know their e-business applications were up and running when their customers wanted to do business.

The right SLA can also offer a means for the service provider to "share the pain" of application downtime. If it does not, chances are it will not be an effective SLA. While an SLA is not intended to be a "money-back guarantee," it should impose enough pain to motivate the outsourcing infrastructure provider to quickly address any problems that arise.

The outsourcing infrastructure provider who wants to run an enterprise's mission-critical e-business application should be clearly focused on application availability, not on the application itself. In fact, application service providers (ASPs) generally prefer working with an outsourcing infrastructure provider who does not also offer competing applications.

What should an SLA for the outsourced infrastructure include? At a minimum, an SLA should identify and describe the services to be supplied by the provider, define the terms and conditions the provider must meet in providing those services, and define the consequences if the provider does not deliver the specified services according to the specified conditions.

In order to be effective in keeping mission-critical applications available at levels to fit particular e-business needs, an SLA should also offer reporting capabilities confirming the provider is complying with the SLA, and cover application availability across the infrastructure that is running the application, not just the separate components of the infrastructure.

Effective SLAs do not just happen. There are important steps that an e-business and an outsourcing infrastructure provider must take together to develop and implement an effective SLA. The first step toward finding the right SLA for e-business needs is finding the right provider--one who is not only compelled but willing to "share the pain" of the e-business downtime.

SUPPORTING DOT-COM GROWTH

Taking a Netsourcing approach to outsourcing, Intira provided both companies with the network and IT infrastructure required to run their mission-critical e-business applications. Intira's comprehensive, scalable, and integrated Netsourcing approach--backed by strong, comprehensive SLAs covering the integrated infrastructure as a whole--won the trust of both dot-com companies. The bottom line was, however, that Intira was willing to share that pain of application availability downtime.

Intira's SLA for each of these dot-com companies provides for 99.95% application availability across the integrated IT and network infrastructure as a whole--the highest level that can be reliably delivered by today's technology. In real-life terms, that means less than four and one-half hours of availability downtime during an entire year.

Intira's Netsourcing infrastructure consists of "lights out" data centers integrated into Intira's own nationwide broadband network, managed and monitored by Intira's automated service management centers. These resources are controlled and owned by Intira. Intira's SLA provides mission-critical fail-over capabilities that include fully redundant application servers, database servers and storage arrays, in addition to Intira's network services. Moreover, Intira mirrors the e-business application across Intira's network and among its data centers.

Intira's customized SLAs provided OnlineChoice.com and FTD.com availability levels to fit the specific needs of each e-business and its application. To arrive at the right SLA for each e-business, project teams from Intira and the e-business met to identify requirements and develop a blueprint, using the services and support of Intira's customer engineering and implementation services professionals. From the blueprint, a comprehensive service description emerged, which became an integral part of the SLA between Intira and each e-business.

To review Intira's performance according to each of their respective SLAs, OnlineChoice.com and FTD.com need only access the secure, Web-based reports that are part of Intira's OneSource-OneCall customer service and support program. OneSource-OneCall is designed to give each e-business a single point of accountability for confirming that Intira is meeting its SLA commitment.

BUYING PEACE OF MIND

With Intira's Netsourcing approach and its comprehensive SLAs, OnlineChoice.com and FTD.com can focus on their core competencies and growth plans, while outsourcing to a single provider the integrated infrastructure and professional expertise required to run their applications, with their mission-critical applications available for their e-business customers.

"With Intira, what we're buying is peace of mind," says Sanjay Chopra, president and chief executive officer of OnlineChoice.com. "We expect Intira's Netsourcing solution to help all of us, including our technology people, sleep better at night."

www.intira.com

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The SLA checklist

This is a simple checklist which may be helpful in evaluating whether an SLA and the outsourcing infrastructure provider offering it can deliver application availability uptime to fit your e-business needs:

[check] Can you understand the SLA? Is it clear what services the provider is to supply? How does the SLA commit to the performance of the services?

[check] Is the SLA measurable? Has the provider built into the infrastructure the tools for tracking and measuring SLA performance data?

[check] Is the SLA's performance data accessible to the customer? Can the customer view the performance data? Does the provider supply secure, Web-based access to the performance data, to allow customers to confirm that the provider is complying with the SLA?

[check] Is the SLA enforceable? Do penalties apply, such as time/monetary credit for units of downtime? Is the pain of these penalties great enough to motivate the provider to act immediately to remedy any problem and to keep the application up and running?

[check] Does the provider offer a comprehensive SLA covering all components of the entire IT and networking infrastructure as an integrated unit, or does the provider offer multiple SLAs covering separate components?