In-Stat: Importance of Wireless SLAs to Businesses Growing Slowly

According to In-Stat, Service Level Agreements (SLA) are "becoming increasingly more important in the US corporate wireless service buyer’s selection process, but for most companies, it is not yet a key decision factor." In-Stat found that the "importance of the SLA among other service attributes across all companies has increased in rank from 7th in a 2004 In-Stat user survey to 6th in the 2005 survey."

Allyn Hall at In-Stat said, "While SLAs may not be of the highest importance today, it is likely that within the next five years SLAs will be an expected service feature, at least for the large enterprises of 1,000 or more employees. Sprint may have set the ball rolling by making the SLA a known option in every contract negotiation. However, significant refinement is required to make SLAs relevant to most corporate buyers.”

In-Stat found the following:

• While data experts are influencing the decision-making process, there is little correlation between CIO or MIS/IT involvement and the importance of the SLA in the buying process.
• Service Quality Management (SQM) tools that provide a more granular, customer-specific performance monitor are now being implemented or considered by most service providers, and this will bring relevance to the SLA.
• As data services become an increasing part of the corporate wireless services package, the SLA will continue to become a higher priority in buying decisions.

Do you think enterprises can get 99.9% coverage and uptime in those SLAs?