Nowadays, everyone is talking about the cloud.  My business card says “Cloud Inventor”.  It’s a bit cheeky, but it makes a point.  For more than 10 years, Evoco has been a cloud-based SaaS provider.  Sure, Evoco is a “private cloud” player for our clients but SaaS fits for us.  We provide SERVICE. That’s what SaaSy companies should be doing.  Providing a service that is above and beyond writing and selling software. 

This brings me to a recent discussion I had with my colleagues about what is “up time”?  What is the definition of service availability in the eyes of our clients?  Do they really care if our system is down due to scheduled or unscheduled maintenance?  Why not just provide a clear metric – are we up or are we down?  Regardless of why a service is down, no one can do their job if the SERVICE is not being provided and I’m not down with that.

If our cell phone provider or ISP were down for scheduled maintenance, wouldn't we be a bit perturbed?  I find it interesting reading discussion boards about SaaS providers on this topic, and finding the asterisk showing most providers exclude scheduled maintenance.  I guess I am very binary... service for a SaaS should imply highly available, and this is measured by one stat: continuous availability. The value to our clients is that we are actually serving our products.  No asterisk.