NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: JEB BOLDING
on APPLICATION SERVICE PROVIDERS
10/24/01 - Today's focus: Service guaranteed

Dear Wincenty Kaminski,

In this issue:

* Guaranteeing service levels when things go wrong
* Links related to ASPs
* Featured reader resource

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Today's focus: Service guaranteed

By Jeb Bolding

I spend a lot of my time at EMA focusing on service-level
agreements and the service-level management tools that attempt
to guarantee those contractual relationships.

Generally speaking, everyone - enterprises, xSPs, and ISVs -
are candidates for purchasing service-level management (SLM)
products to ensure their service-level agreements with their
customers. However, most toolsets on the market are in a
nascent period of development as they get a handle on how their
prospective customers want to see the reported SLM information
and what kind of action they want to take based on the metrics
they've gathered.

One thing we at EMA stress is that business transaction should
be the center of the service level agreement. While SLM tools
need to have a clear understanding of the integrity,
performance, and availability of components that support that
transaction, ultimately, the goal of SLM tools is to provide
the data and the automated actions that will guarantee a
consistent user experience.

As straightforward as this goal may sound, the vendor landscape
in support of this is quite scattered. Most vendors have a
product roadmap that leads toward a business transaction
monitoring solution, but many are still heavily focused on
providing detailed metrics about components, regardless of
their impact on the business process.

Assuming that an xSP has deployed some good, business-focused
SLM tools, things will still go wrong, transactions will be
lost, content will not be served up properly, and users will
leave because performance doesn't meet their expectations.

Since an xSP's business is dependent on its digital presence
always being there, xSPs need to implement solutions that
engage the user while there are problems so that the users
don't simply disappear into the Internet.

One potential solution that I've come across is a product
called RainAssure, created by Rainfinity. RainAssure software
sits between a company's Web servers and the switch or load
balancer.

RainAssure correlates transactions to faulty infrastructure
components, and as it watches the transactions coming into the
site that are answered by 404 errors or incorrect content, it
serves up configurable Web content designed to ensure user
experience continuity.

For example, in a faulty financial transaction series,
RainAssure could display pages that provide the users with a
mirror of where they were in the transaction process and then
either a phone number or e-mail address that they can use to
complete their transaction.

Alternatively, a Web page could be displayed that tells the
user there was a problem completing the transaction, but that
their session state was maintained and if they should retry
their transaction submission once again.

Finally, on the administrative side of things, RainAssure
provides detailed reports of completed and incomplete or
"dropped" transactions. In this way, xSPs can tie direct
dollar value to the transactions that they support, and more
importantly, RainAssure can provide financial value to
transactions that were not completed.

In the end, SLM tools are there to give IT some breathing space
for fixing the problems that occur along their infrastructure.
If a technology solution can give IT an extra 10 minutes to fix
a problem while still engaging an online customer, that
technology has done its job.

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To contact Jeb Bolding:

Jeb Bolding is senior consultant with Enterprise Management
Associates in Boulder, Colo., an analyst and market research
firm focusing exclusively on enterprise management. Bolding has
10 years of experience in the network systems industry, most
recently with eCollege.com, an ASP for higher education, where
he was director of product development. He can be reached at
mailto:jbolding@enterprisemanagement.com.
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RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS

Rainfinity
http://www.rainfinity.com

Managed hosting vendors winning converts
Network World, 10/22/01
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/1022specialfocus.html

Breaking ASP news from Network World, updated daily:
http://www.nwfusion.com/topics/asp.html

Archive of the ASP newsletter:
http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/asp/index.html
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FEATURED READER RESOURCE

Network World Fusion's Net.Worker site

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