8x8 Announces SLA for Enterprise Customers

Service-level agreements (SLAs), are on the rise as enterprises realize growing risks in a legally complex and increasingly regulated, interconnected global economy, and so 8x8’s recent announcement is good news for qualified enterprise customers. The company announced its SLA, which promises quite a few benefits.

According to the news release, “8x8's "Performance Assured" SLA provides guarantees of more than 99.99 percent uptime in addition to a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of greater than or equal to 3.0 for at least 98 percent of all calls carried over the network, including those using compressed codecs such as G.729a which typically exhibit less than toll quality MOS scores even under perfect network conditions.”

SLAs are common in the Software-as-a-Service delivery model of IT resources for obvious reasons. When you rely on a third party for IT capabilities via a Web browser, you trust them with some of your key business functions. You need to safeguard elements like the minimum level of service uptime, and ensure the service does what it is supposed to do.

"The ability to deliver and guarantee enterprise grade service availability and voice quality normally reserved for private connections reinforces 8x8's position as a market leader," said Diane Myers, principal analyst, Infonetics Research, part of IHS Inc.  in a statement to the press. "This assurance that 8x8's hosted PBX and unified communications solution meets the quality and reliability requirements of customers, while at the same time delivering valuable benefits, will go a long way in supporting 8x8's push into the midmarket and enterprise segment."

SLAs offer a number of benefits to both parties, including delivering clear performance expectations of both the customer and provider, cementing the roles and responsibilities of each party, and drawing attention to customers’ priority needs.

"8x8 has invested significant engineering and operations resources to perfect the delivery of VoIP over the public Internet," said Mehdi Salour, Senior Vice President of Network Operations and Support at 8x8. "The technologies we have invented and the relentless effort we have made to measure availability and service quality for every call have given us the data we need to provide our customers with this new service level agreement."