Ten Questions: Signing a Service Level Agreement
In either case, there will be a need for a lot of documentation to be drafted, specifications set, and requirements mandated. No one will know better than the IT teams within your world how to prepare, pilot, and deploy a webcasting or other video initiative, but the guidance of a solid CDN with enterprise deployment successes will really get you up and running faster and provide insights to your internal IT leaders.
A good CDN will be eager to engage your internal IT resources and facilitate the integration process. After all, your success is their success!
Legal
There will be a need for red-lining and negotiation of the final agreement. I can’t stress enough how important it will be to have a lawyer (or 5) present during this process. You really need to get a lawyer with IT know-how, or you will be spending more time on translating all the jargon when you should be delivering video!
Accounting
The financial review and price negotiation phases will need to be managed by an accounting team, as will the on-going relationship. Rates will change according to market and will require annual, if not quarterly, reviews and adjustments.
More important is the enforcement of SLA reimbursements based on percent of "misses" of established minimum performance levels. The minds of our IT managers and the financial managers need to come together and agree on what this technology means. If a media server goes down, you will need to agree on how much that down time will cost the enterprise in monetary terms.
Often times enforcement of compensation is overlooked and reimbursement isn't enforced because the technology management and accounting teams aren't able to communicate in a way that makes sense to each other. Account management may not be able to understand a network performance chart or have the acumen to translate metrics into a financial equivalent.
This is a trend I have seen quite often in enterprise organizations. It renders the SLA useless, and so we've just wasted a lot of resources for ritual sake.
Production and Supplier Relationship Management
You’ll need several individuals or teams to assist with this aspect of service:
—A production team to create each webcast or on-demand event. You will have to determine if production will be fulfilled in-house or through the CDN or a third-party provider.
—Managers and administrators to take ownership of applications that enable the production and publication of streaming media. They will be provided with account access and service updates from the CDN.
—Analysts that can interpret the supplier-provided service-level metrics for regular review.
What level of service do I need?
The budget is always a primary consideration in selecting an SLA package. Next to that, having an idea of how many people will be viewing the content and how they will be viewing it will really force you to the correct SLA.