Driving Value by Negotiating Win-win On Demand SLAs

This morning, a couple dozen SAAS executives gathered at the MassTLC's SAAS Cluster for a member-only roundtable on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) lead by Eric Esperne of James River Consulting and Bob Murphy of Inforonics.

Participants around the table shared their experiences and discussed industry best practices. For example, the issue of what level SLA a SAAS provider should offer when their product leverages open APIs to incorporate other SAAS services into their offering, such as Google Maps, was discussed. Gene Landy of Ruberto Israel & Weiner suggested that you should only offer an SLA on those services for which you have direct control. He noted that it matters whether a provider private labels the third party service. If you brand the service, such as Google Maps, your customer will understand that Google's SLA should control, but if you private label the service, then your SLA might be deemed to govern. Following the content discussion, members of the MassTLC SAAS Advisory Board convened a meeting to continue planning the group's public and member-only meetings.