ITM301 Module 2, Case 2

The two cloud hosting vendors I will be comparing are Salesforce and Rackspace. Different parameters were taken to compare the vendors. These parameters are: Price, Security, compatibility, Uptime and Services. The below table will show difference between these two vendors.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurement of success for a cloud hosting vendor. Each vendor has several KPIs, this is how a user can measure growth of the cloud provider. Key performance indicators (KPIs) measure a company's success versus a set of targets, objectives, or industry peers (Twin, 2019). Some examples of important KPIs are customer growth, churn rate, average revenue per user and gross margin per product/service (Kozlowicz, 2017).

A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider (either internal or external) and the end user that defines the level of service expected from the service provider. SLA serves as the foundation for the expected level of service between the consumer and the provider (Patel, 2009). Salesforce does not have a SLA on their website and the closest thing to a SLA that they have is the Master Subscription Agreement and the only thing they commit to is making sure online service are available 24/7. And as for Rackspace, they have a SLA and they go over their agreements for different topics such as cloud storage, cloud monitoring, network availability, cloud server host, cloud support service, etc.

If I was to recommend a vendor to use, I would recommend using Rackspace because they do have a SLA which is very important. At lease the users can go over their agreements and see what they will guarantee to their customers. But as for Salesforce, they don’t have a SLA and this can be a deal breaker to users.

References

Twin, A. (2019, September). Investopedia. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/kpi.asp

Patel, P., Ranabahu, A. H., & Sheth, A. P. (2009). Service Level Agreement in Cloud Computing. Retrieved from http://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/knoesis/78

Kozlowicz, J. (2017, July). Green House Data. Key Performance Indicators for Cloud Providers, Resellers, and Channel Partners. Retrieved from https://www.greenhousedata.com/blog/key-performance-indicators-for-cloud-providers-resellers-channel-partners