Want more evidence of how HP is doing? Read this article about HP’s cloud efforts. It calls out SLAs as a key differentiator. In their eyes, the reason customers will pick HP over Amazon is a number on a contract. I wanted to cry.
Protection by SLA is no protection at all. Every competent cloud architect gets this. They expect failure, design for it, and cause failure as a method of testing. Good architecture renders the SLA irrelevant. Good cloud providers will get involved in their customers’ architecture, primarily to ensure customer satisfaction with the results, but also to avoid paying out unnecessarily under an SLA. In that sense, I guess a good SLA would serve to motivate the cloud provider, but that’s a different discussion.
Anyway, out comes Gartner’s assessment to say that HP’s SLA is hardly better than Amazon’s. So now what have you got? Hewlett and Packard are on permanent grave rotation.