I have to be honest, after leading the SLA & KPI Management market for years we internally thought it a dead market. We thought that all was said and done in that space and that we had a nice ride on it.

As good, focused businessmen, we focused all our efforts towards the up and coming market of IT Financial Management, in which we played for years but seemed to really pick up only in the last two years.

Guess what? The SLA deals kept on coming and even more importantly, after directing our sales team to not sell both together, they came back with more and more feedback from customers who wanted SLA in tandem with IT Financial Management.

Well that’s a pleasant surprise! But what’s behind it? It’s very simple. Once you know the TCO and Unit Cost of services, and allocations are done accurately, you need to make decisions as to what are you willing to spend money on and how much.

But how do you do that in IT? You set a business SLA and see if you are willing to pay for it. Are you willing to pay 100K more annually so that your response time for non-critical applications is 2 minutes vs. 30? Are you willing to have your expense management system down on average 4 hours per month except for the last week of the month rather than 30 minutes but avoid 200K annually?

And the examples go on and on. Bottom line: If you are planning, showing, charging and optimizing IT cost, you must measure value.

Long live SLA’s!