By Philbert Shih, theWHIR.com
July 28, 2005 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — After enhancing the service level agreements for its managed wide area network services in April, MCI (mci.com) has again raised the bar. The company, one of the world’s largest hosts, announced on Tuesday that it would extend the performance thresholds recently set for its managed wide area network services to the local area network.
“We’re extending our managed WAN network services for network restoration guarantees to our managed LAN customers,” says Jim DeMerlis, vice president of managed network services for MCI.
MCI is guaranteeing a 3.5-hour time-to-repair for LANs in the US. “We’re announcing an actual time-to-repair metric on LAN devices, and within the US we’ve extended the 3.5 hour commitment that we’ve been offering for a few months now, for our WAN services, down to the customer’s local area network,” says Cliff Cibelli, senior product manager for MCI.
For key international locations the time to repair is a slightly higher four hours. These locations include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. For remote regions, MCI is committed to a six-hour time frame.
Another metric penned into MCI’s SLA is LAN device availability for workgroup and core LAN devices. “In addition to bringing that device back up and restoring it within 3.5 hours we’re offering an availability metric on the device,” says Cibelli. For workgroup LAN devices, MCI is guaranteeing 99.5 percent availability, and for workgroup LAN devices the number is 99.95 percent.
MCI will also extend its LAN service commitments for third party or non-MCI networks. The time to repair for third party networks is set at six hours for the 48 contiguous states in the United States. The device availability commitment is available for any MCI approved provider.
The performance guarantees in MCI’s SLAs are all supported with financial credits. “Unlike some of our competitors who may charge more for higher availability metrics on a SLA – this is included in the cost of our standard managed services,” says Cibelli.
Network downtime has an impact on any enterprise and the SLAs are specifically designed to minimize its negative effects. Quicker restorations will mean less average loss per disruption, MCI says, and that in turn brings down the total cost of ownership and frees up resources for core business functions. MCI says its monitoring capabilities bring enhanced visibility into network health and real-time notification services will create an enhance feeling of control for the customer.
“The bottom line there is that the faster repair time drives the total cost of ownership for a customer down and minimizes the impact when they are affected by an outage,” says Cibelli.
MCI expects this to pave the way for companies to move into next generation IP-based services such as voice over Internet Protocol.
“The LAN plays a very critical role in the implementation of VoIP and we believe this service will help customers in that decision to move to VoIP,” says DeMerlis.
Cibelli explains that the LAN, which has traditionally carried just data, will carry voice traffic with VoIP deployments. And this makes it even more crucial, he says, that outages adversely affect users for any extended period of time don’t occur.
“When an end user picks up a telephone they want dial tone, they expect dial tone … they want to be able to make phone calls, and when they can’t you certainly lose productivity,” says Cibelli.
MCI is in a unique position to offer these metrics, Cibelli says. Its network management platform, augmented by a 5,400-strong globally deployed team of network engineers, forms the foundation. And it has been strengthened with new capabilities in recent months including Rapid Fault isolation, which monitors networks, isolating and pinpointing anomalies or faults as they occur.
MCI’s newly enhanced SLAs are immediately available for all new managed LAN services available with the company’s managed security, hosting, contact center services and MCI Advantage, its integrated networking solution. MCI’s six-point guarantee includes service commitments for device availability, restoration, service installation, proactive outage notification, change management and configuration back-up.
