Category Archives: SAAS

What most CIOs and CMOs miss when they negotiate their SaaS SLA.

21 Thursday Jan 2021

Posted by in Business Continuity, Cloud, Data Science, Digital Transformation, SAAS

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When negotiating a SaaS SLA (Software As A Service Service Level Agreement), CIOs and CMOs often fail to consider the integrations between SaaS and on-premise applications, such as ERP, stock management or order fulfilment. The business logic and data required for these integrations are crucial aspects of the SaaS model.

Failing to ensure the integrity of these integrations can lead to several service degradations, including:

  • Consumer dissatisfaction, leading to revenue loss through service credits and lost sales
  • Delayed or incomplete product deliveries
  • Negative publicity on social media
  • Inaccurate stock levels, leading to an inability to fulfil orders
  • Revenue loss due to technical capacity shortages, especially during traffic spikes, where even if the core capabilities can handle the demand, integration failures can negatively impact the consumer experience
  • Time-consuming incident resolution

SaaS integrations are often treated as mere technical tasks rather than being designed as part of the service. This approach often neglects crucial factors such as:

  • Product & Market strategy
  • Service design
  • Pricing strategy
  • SLA
  • Technical architecture

A comprehensive Integration SLA should encompass the following elements:

  • Product strategy
  • Market strategy
  • Detailed SLA for each class of integration, including monitoring – Integrations should be viewed as transactional information
  • Pricing strategy

It is essential to recognise that no service provider operates in isolation. Understanding the operating ecosystem is crucial for designing services and catalogues and structuring the SLA.

Listing integrations with their associated service levels in the SLA helps structure the relationship between the customer and the service provider.

British Airways Technology Chaos, really caused by a power surge?

18 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in Business Continuity, Cloud, Innovation, SAAS

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Most people are questioning the BA’s version on how their entire Information System went down on  May 27th 2017, impacting 75,000 passengers for up to 48 hours and will cost up to £80m.

British Airways states that a human error caused by an engineer who disconnected a power supply cable trigerred major outage due to  a power surge.
The question is how a such outage lasted so long? The “power surge” term is misleading, because most people will think power in terms of electricity  as opposed to Information Ecosystem.
In terms of Service Outage Communication, the challenge is to inform without revealing some embarrassing facts, the challenge is to partially say the truth without lying. In this instance, I must admit that BA is doing a good job.
My theory is that BA’s system crashed as a result of the power outage, but BA’s team did not restart the entire ecosystem in sequence. My assumption is that BA’s system were all restarted simultaneously causing what they have called the “power surge“. The question is whether BA had a datacenter restart runbook, or not, and whether if the required documentation existed, whether it was ever tested.
Complex ecosystems require to restart key Infrastructure components, but following a pre-established sequence. For example, the core storage first, then database cashing infrastructure followed by database systems, this is even more true with architectures based on microservices.
In other words, backend systems should be restarted first followed by frontends. If you do not follow a pre-established sequence, the different components of the ecosystems will randomly resume they operations and start “talking” and expect answers. When a non synchronised datacenter restart is performed,   It is likely to end up with data corruption. Furthermore, as the front-end caching infrastructure is not warm, the backend will crash under the load, preventing the reopening of services.
If this scenario happened at BA, the databases storing flight reservations, flight plans and customer details got corrupted up to a point where it became impossible to resume their operations from the second datacentre, also now partially corrupted as a result of the active-active synchronisation performed in between the two datacenter.

British Airways had then no other options than to restore backups and then replay system logs of unsynchronised systems, and then only resume synchronisations with the second datacenter.

Obviously, this is a much more difficult reality to explain, but I talked to several IT experts and no-one, absolutely nobody is buying the power surge story.
I’m looking forward to hearing from the internal investigation that BA’s chief executive has already launched.

Get Ready because Black Friday this year is going to be Bloody Friday.

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Business Continuity, Cloud, Digital Transformation, SAAS, SmartSourcing

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All the major retailers in the UK are prepared and are announcing their Black Friday super productions:

The Award for the Best Comedy goes to Tesco!

Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 21.08.37

Last year I wrote a post on “Taking orders is great but how about delivering on time and on quality?”. It is pretty hilarious but Tesco have already given up.

They announce that “Due to unexpected high demand all deliveries will take 5-7 days” and “Express delivery is currently unavailable”.

No, you are not dreaming, today 11th November, 16 days before Black Friday, Tesco are informing us that “Due to unexpected demand” they can’t deliver on time. Tesco is officially inventing a new concept: The Unexpected Expected High Demand, LoL. For a company breathing Customer Satisfaction, this is very interesting. Basically, Tesco has made the decision not to invest in sufficient capacity on the front and back office. They will be, knowingly, selling beyond their firm value chain capacity.

The award for the Best Customer engagement goes to Argos.co.uk.

Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 21.07.59

They are offering to consumers the option to register in order to get “quicker access to our biggest deals and faster in-store collection from our Fast Track counter in-store when you buy online. Plus we’ll hold your item for 7 days, so you can pick it up when convenient.”.  Very good Argos, “Quicker access” means that you’ll get a link to the page and you will have a VIP pass to the site when it will be blocked because it is too busy. That’s the e-version of the stamp at the top of your hand giving you access to the night club. You remember? The queue outside, you have your stamp and you get in and out as many times as you went. Argos will make you a VIP.  Well done Argos, however it would be better to get your capacity planning right so that you don’t need to implement it. Argos, have already given up on delivery though.

Remember that last year the carriers complained that the retailers did not inform them on planned demand. It will be interesting to see whether this year the carriers or the retailers are blaming each other.

The award for the best “we are mastering it” goes to Amazon and John Lewis.

John Lewis

Amazon's site

The two retailers are simply informing their consumers of the dates of Black Friday and also that they already have ongoing promotions. Last year, both retailers delivered both on performance and customer service, with an advantage to John Lewis because they pay all their taxes in the UK and because it is good for the UK economy. Amazon is knowingly applying a tax avoidance strategy, even though things should get better.

Stay tuned…