Another outage and blow for Cloud computing, today 68,000 Salesforce.com customers were without service for over 1hr.
This is on the back of an number of high profile outages in 2009 including a large outage from Google in May, Rackspace in June and Amazon amongst others. All the surveys and market intelligence I have seen will rank "Reliablity" in the top 3 as being a major concern and inhibitor for enterprise customers when considering managed and cloud services (and IT out-tasking in general) as a means of consuming their Information and Communication technologies.
The "I told you so" guys are always going to make hay out of these kind of events - to counter this we should ask (and train the sales force to do that same) What kind of reliability does the average enterprise or SMB experience with applications and hardware they run themselves ?
What should be highlighted in the Managed and Cloud Services value proposition - is not only the feature function of the service itself - but the investment the following.
People: Show the NOC staff, skill sets, certifications, tiering, knowledge bases, and training programs that you have invested in.
Process: Talk about the processes (ITIL), escalation, continuous performance, ISO and six sigma processes that are in use
Technology: Finally - show how the people and process are enabled by the investment in the provisioning, monitoring, service orchestration, NMS, Correlation, Performance Management and ticketing systems that has been made to support and service and stand behind the SLAs.
In my years on the road in front of customers - with almost no exception there was never a case where the custom had made anything like the investment that the mature MSP has. Couched correctly - you can't be arrogant about it - but a respectful and authoritative review of the above can be a real boost in the MSPs value proposition.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment