Tuesday, March 2

2003 Market Research on SLAs from Veritas

In a September 2003 survey commissioned by Veritas, data-center managers and their non-IT counterparts at 604 organizations with at least 500 employees responded to questions on the nature of their usage of SLAs. Veritas sponsored the survey as part of its "Utility Computing" product focus.

I've culled some of their statistics here, but you can download the original report for the full analysis.

1. Over 59% of the respondents do use SLAs.

2. Among organizations that have SLAs in place, the following key IT performance areas are covered:

- Processing performance (37 percent)
- System availability and uptime (35 percent)
- Restoration times following an outage (29 percent)
- None of the above (39 percent)

3. Twenty five percent of all cases said the SLAs were crafted without the involvement of the department heads.

4. With respect to the IT reports generated in support of SLAs, non-IT managers used them as follows:

- to make department operations more efficient (34 percent)
- to work with the IT department to lower costs (28 percent)
- not used successfully (39 percent)

The research covered a wide array of companies in the United States, nine countries throughout Europe, the Middle East and South Africa. It was conducted by Dynamic Markets of the UK.