Customers paying Google for Gmail are guaranteed that the email service will be available 99.9 percent of the time, or they will be entitled to a refund. The company has now extended the promise to Google Calendar, Docs and all the other elements of its Apps service.
"Today, we're announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service-level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk," said Matthew Glotzbach, director of Google Enterprise product management, in a blog posting on Wednesday.
Service-level agreements are an important tool for gaining the trust of potential business users. For such customers, service disruptions mean revenue disruptions. Specific promises can help allay concerns about the risks of moving from in-house computing systems to the cloud.
Google also pledged to improve communication with customers in the event of an outage.
"We've made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups," Glotzbach said (Google is in the process of moving its Google Apps discussion group site).
Google has suffered several Google Apps outages, including one two weeks ago. But Glotzbach took pains to persuade people that downtime is relative.
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According to Radicati Group research, companies using Novell GroupWise, IBM Lotus and Microsoft Exchange for their email have somewhere between 66 and 150 minutes of downtime per month. According to Google's own measurements, which are recorded down to the millisecond, Gmail has been available 99.9 percent of the time for its entire user base, which means downtime of about 10 to 15 minutes per month.
"That 10-to-15-minutes-per-month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry," Glotzbach said.
