Open Forum

I understand that cloud services infrastructure design is often 'sensitive' and companies don't like to confirm exact details - and I accept that.

We selected 8x8 as our potential preferred solution on the basis it was a 'true cloud' solution (i.e. hosted in multiple locations internationally with multiple failovers).

The 8x8 website and sales teams are very keen to promote the 99.999% uptime and SLA.

We have initially chosen to purchase 8x8 through a reseller (although I am questioning that decision), and when I came to review the SLAs, I could not find any reference to the 99.999% availability. I questioned this with both the reseller and 8x8, and eventually was told (by 8x8) that you need to spend a significant amount per month to get the 99.999% SLA

When I questioned 8x8 on what my actual SLA would be, 8x8 said they were unable to tell me because this has to come from the reseller.

If the 8x8 cloud infrastructure is hosted and managed by 8x8 (and my reseller is simply reselling licenses and providing services), then I don't understand how the reseller can control the SLA. Surely this has to come from the people providing the service (8x8)?

The only way it would make sense for the reseller to give the SLA is if they were hosting our 8x8 instance in their datacentre - in which case we are no better off than any other hosted telephony solution (where the support partner will host a telephone system in a data centre, possibly with a failover to a second data centre). This is the scenario we are in at the moment, and we are looking for better resilience.

How do I confirm where and how my potential 8x8 solution will be hosted, and what SLA / uptime can I expect?

Does anyone else think it is unacceptable to clearly quote and promote a 99.999% SLA on the website, with no indication that this is subject to a minimum monthly spend?

https://www.8x8.com/why-8x8/reliability

I think there are several key differentiators here.

Support response SLA's, they may be entirely up to your reseller.

Then on platform reliability, an SLA is usually backed by a financial guarantee to compensate when the SLA is not met.

So it may be up to your reseller to agree what, if any level of SLA they will stand over.

You could say that the "core platform" SLA and customer specific SLA may not always align, remember that customer specific outages can also occur.

If there is no financial guarantee agreed to back up an SLA then the platform SLA is more of an indicator of overall reliability rather than anything you can hold them to account for.