In a move that supports the recognized importance of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to the success of the ASP industry, Qwest Cyber.Solutions LLC (QCS) today becomes the first ASP to unveil an industry leading package of SLAs called QCS ProofPositive, promising total customer satisfaction.
With comprehensive, well-defined SLAs available at three levels — 99, 99.7 and 99.99 percent — QCS is helping customers significantly decrease the business impact of downtime. The availability levels range from 7 hours 20 minutes of downtime per month to no more than 4 minutes and 22 seconds for selected platforms.
To deliver on ProofPositive, QCS developed QCS Sentry, a process for reliable delivery of world-class applications and maximum system availability designed to improve the end user experience of critical business systems.
QCS has made significant financial and technological investments to develop QCS Sentry, which will provide comprehensive and proactive management, monitoring and reporting infrastructure for application and transaction performance.
QCS has taken an aggressive approach to building the right tools and technology that enable these new ProofPositive SLAs. To meet the variety of customer requirements, QCS ProofPositive offers a choice of three service levels on selected platforms: Standard, Enhanced Response and Business Critical.
ProofPositive Standard provides strong service guarantees on all components of QCS’ ASP services including the application, performance and disaster recovery. For QCS Ultimate Freedom customers choosing ProofPositive Standard, QCS guarantees 99 percent application availability, 30-minute response to critical issues, which will be escalated within 2 hours. In addition, QCS will provide less than 70 percent CPU utilization and less than 90 percent storage utilization. QCS will also provide disaster recovery with 7 days recovery time for failed systems to the last available data recovery point, and QCS will meet the “customer satisfaction” level based on feedback from a quarterly survey.
The Enhanced Response SLA is for customers requiring added availability and faster recovery requirements beyond the basic offering. Beyond the standard offering, this level provides customers with 99.7 percent application availability, 20-minute critical issue response and 3-day disaster recovery.
Customers with time sensitive, mission critical data will benefit from the Business Critical level SLA that provides assurances for the highest level of application performance and response time. ProofPositive Business Critical provides 99.99 percent application availability, 10-minute response to critical issues, and 4-hour disaster recovery.
“We are strong believers that customers should expect more from their ASP partner than checkbook compensation for insufficient service levels,” said John Charters, CEO, Qwest Cyber.Solutions “Today only a handful of the largest enterprises have the financial and technology resources to ensure maximum availability of applications, but now with QCS Sentry and ProofPositive, QCS is setting the new standards for service in the ASP environment.”
QCS delivers scalable and reliable business critical software solutions through remote management and hosting of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business-to-Business (B2B) E-Commerce applications. A joint venture between Qwest Communications International Inc. (NYSE:Q) and KPMG Consulting, QCS leverages Qwest’s state-of-the-art Internet protocol broadband network and CyberCenters as well as KPMG’s consulting and software integration expertise. QCS’ software applications portfolio includes Ariba, Captura, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Siebel and others.
