Since October 2001, the TeleManagement Forum has been writing the book on service level agreements — the handbook, to be precise. The SLA Management Handbook is now a four-volume set, thanks to the latest contribution by The Open Group Quality of Service Task Force, which provided a 100-page-plus document describing SLA requirements from an enterprise point of view.

The Open Group is a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium that works with other consortia and standards bodies, as well as enterprises and suppliers, to capture, understand and address current and emerging requirements, establish policies and share best practices. Like the TMF, its mission is to facilitate interoperability, develop consensus and evolve and integrate specifications and open source technologies. The Open Group also operates a certification service, which includes UNIX certification.

The first three volumes of the SLA Handbook consist of an executive overview, concepts and principles, and service and technology examples, respectively. The executive summary (volume 1) provides an introduction to SLA concepts, business cases and the benefits and consequences of these agreements. It is meant for C-level executive and boards of directors. Volume 2, Concepts and Principles, was written for telecom managers and suppliers and describes the SLA management process as it relates to the TMF's eTOM (Telecom Operations Map) and discusses principles such as the service access point, the delivery point, and measurement and reporting strategies. Volume 3 is aimed at the implementer. It describes standard methods for applying an SLA.

These three volumes are likely the most comprehensive written for telecom personnel on what it takes to establish, apply and maintain an SLA from their point of view. But where the three volumes fell short is in appreciating the point of view of the other party in the typical SLA: the enterprise.

“Enterprises are looking for a much more business-focused approach to the whole business of service level agreements,” said Martin Kirk, director of The Open Group Enterprise Management Forum.

“Volume 4: The Enterprise Perspective,” supplies that. It addresses the enterprise issues in the provisioning of end-to-end SLAs. This end-to-end view is distinct from the service provider view, which The Open Group sees as more of an edge-to-edge view because it stops at the customer premises.

“Rather than simple, IT-related metrics, SLAs need to be couched in terms of business processes that address the issues that are critical to the success of the enterprise,” Kirk said.

In preparation for the handbook — and to better understand the enterprise's perceived SLA issues — the task force commissioned a survey from Sage Research. One of the issues the survey identified was that available technology must fall more in line with the standards bodies' concepts.

“There is a wide gulf between what the standards bodies are thinking about in terms of technologies to ensure quality of service and what is known and used by many IT managers responsible for running networks at the enterprise level,” the task force wrote in the foreword to the handbook.

The survey also found that 81% of enterprises had or planned to have SLAs for traditional telco services such as frame relay and ATM (70%). This wasn't very different from the percentage that required SLAs for internal communications such as voice over IP (77%) and videoconferencing (63%).

Currently, about 60% of the 150 enterprises that responded to the survey have SLAs in place. Somewhat surprising was that the main reason for having them was to improve planning. This was followed by the need to control costs and allowing enterprises to offer their SLAs to customers and internal organizations.

SLAs are definitely no longer all about the service provider, said Kelly Flynn-Muller, program manager for service level management at Internap Network Services and team leader for the TMF's SLA Management Team. “The SLA today is seen less as a guarantee and more as a way of doing business,” she said.

Internap takes an aggressive approach to SLAs. They're some of the most aggressive agreements in the industry, she said. Atlanta-based Internap provides intelligent routing services to more than 1900 Fortune 1000 and mid-tier business customers and financial services companies. Those services, which utilize the Internet backbone, support not just voice and data packets but mission-critical applications. Traditional telcos aren't used to supporting services from an application level — not even across their own closed, high-availability networks.

Yet according to volume 4 of the handbook, applications are what enterprises most want protected and insured. It's part of what The Open Group calls boundary-less information flow, which enables access to integrated information within and between enterprises based on open standards and interoperability.

With her experience managing SLAs for the enterprise, Flynn-Muller was tapped to lead the TMF's SLA efforts. “We learned a lot about supporting business applications,” she said. “One of the tricks is to get operators measuring performance in the same way.”

If they measure it the same way the enterprise does, then service providers will be looking at the enterprise customers' quality of experience (QOE). That means, according to the document, the quality of service (QOS) or product, and includes all aspects of service: performance, level of customer satisfaction on both the pre-sale and post-sale process, and the delivery of products.

“QOE provides a discriminator between various types of service or product that an enterprise provides and leads to opportunities to balance the level of quality offered against price and customer expectation,” the book states.

One of the most difficult relationships to define, which volume 4 does in section 1.4 (Quality Concepts and Mapping), is that between QOE and what is typically defined as QOS in an SLA. QOE, according to the book, represents the perception of quality (subjective) whereas most SLAs rely on key performance indicators that refer to the definition, measurement and reporting of objective measures, which can be identified through testing and management systems.

Subjective measures (key quality indicators) don't translate well to contractual agreements; therefore, they must be mapped to key performance indicators and can be included in an SLA. This mapping is defined in the handbook.

None of this suggests that the service provider can or should be expected to support the internal business and technical metrics employed by its enterprise customers. It only helps service providers better understand what both they and their customers are trying to accomplish.

However, the SLA in place between the service provider and the enterprise should not be the responsibility of the enterprise to track, Flynn-Muller said. “An SLA should be proactive.”

The methods and procedures for being proactive in terms of notification, reimbursement, heading off trouble and identifying danger points are described in volumes 2 and 3 of the handbook. Volume 4 discusses how these capabilities and requirements have extended into the enterprise in two ways. First, the very network protocols being used increasingly by service providers today were once the domain of the enterprise: Ethernet, IP and SNMP, for example. This has allowed the service provider to look more deeply into the enterprise domain. Also, service providers have grown their managed services businesses and are at times in direct control of more enterprise networks, services and even applications such as e-mail and security.

Section 5 of volume 4 provides detailed service definitions and key quality indicators for business applications. It also provides a calculation formula for basic service availability and other methods and equations for measuring quality from the enterprise perspective. Other sections include key quality indicators for enterprise business services, use cases, management and reporting, and several forms for enterprise SLAs, negotiation definitions and a development process.

Overall, the fourth and final edition takes the edge-to-edge view of the service provider and gives the service provider the tools to provide a true end-to-end SLA.