As the end of the year approaches, now is the time to prioritize and work on vendor strategic sourcing projects. There are a variety of types of exit language that protect a business from being trapped in a deal if things change down the road. It’s easy to get comfortable with initial agreements as relationships … Read more
SLAs are for lawyers. Service level objectives not only introduce finer-grained reliability metrics, but also put that telemetry data into the context of user happiness. Service level agreements (SLAs) first became popular with fixed-line telecom companies in the late 1980s. For the last 20 years, billboards with five nines (99.999%) have peppered every interstate in … Read more
Open-source code in commercial network software can mean that when flaws are found by open-source project teams, fixes don’t make it to the commercial products. The continuous influx of open-source software (OSS) into enterprise IT departments is, in many ways, an enormous boon to both vendors and users. For the former, the ability to use … Read more
From treating service-level agreements as a one-time exercise to failing to establish escape clauses, IT leaders should avoid these pitfalls when partnering with IT service and cloud partners to drive business value. Being diligent about service-level agreements (SLAs) has always been important for IT organizations working with IT service and cloud providers. But understanding how to negotiate, … Read more
