Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Teaming Up with the Right Management Service: Page 8 of 25

For example, we specified that branches were to experience 99.9 percent uptime and no more than 2 seconds in network latency. But nothing in the 100-page response spoke directly to these thresholds. There was detailed SLA governance documented, with ongoing feedback built in to guide and align service delivery and expectations; all good, but not on point. Further, we would have expected some push back, like we got from NetProactive, about being held responsible for the WAN circuit providers, but HCL didn't address this.

This isn't to say that HCL appeared lax or unable to perform; we just didn't see our specific concerns addressed and didn't get that warm and fuzzy feeling that TacDoh would receive VIP treatment.

HCL did break its regular service into very organized responsibility areas. The engineering services, which include capacity planning, add an additional $12,000 per month to the bill. It's possible that if a network engineer is left on the TacDoh IT staff this charge could be partially mitigated, but not totally eliminated because other engineering services likely will be required.

In general, HCL's SLA management was organized, but not very detailed. It appears from the RFI response that HCL has procedures in place to track the SLAs that TacDoh cares about, but the answer is short on specifics. We asked how the charges and service levels would deal with acts of God, for instance, or the dreaded NTF, but there was no response.

We got lots of talk about how well-organized HCL's NOC was, less about the service it was to provide. For example, the NOC supports two Internet connections, with the second having a direct satellite uplink to Thailand ISP ThaiCom, to avoid any catastrophes.