| Guarantee Service Quality through Win-Win Service Level Agreements
| Overview | | Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define expectations among two or more parties regarding service quality, priorities, and responsibilities. While SLAs have traditionally been a contract between a Service Provider and an Enterprise customer, the expanding value chain for new-generation services has made SLAs important for a myriad of partnerships, including: • Service Provider to End User;
• Service Provider to Vendor;
• Service Provider to Enterprise (e.g., a large business or an MVNO);
• Enterprise to End User;
• Service Provider to Enterprise (i.e., an MVNO);
• Network Provider to Service Provider (e.g., i.e., a network access provider)
• Vendor to Network Provider, Service Provider, or Enterprise;
• Content Provider to Content Aggregator or Advertiser.
To compete successfully, companies must proactively manage the quality of their services. Since provisioning of those services is dependent on multiple partners, management of partner services SLAs become critical for success. SLAs are used to define and manage expectations among partners for performance, customer care, billing, service provisioning, and other critical business areas.
SLA Management can also be used to assess predefined penalties when SLA parameters, such as failure to meet performance, timeline, or cost requirements, are not met. For example, if network downtime exceeds one hour, the penalty is a 10 percent rebate of service fees.
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| Business Benefits | | Improve and differentiate services by defining performance and its measures | Strengthen compliance to ITIL®, Sarbanes-Oxley, Six Sigma, and COBIT | | Build actionable performance tracking and controls | Produce a common language for characterizing network and operational parameters | |
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