Vinnie blogs about Gartner bringing down their site for scheduled maintenance with a cookie cutter "apology" page and asks "Does Gartner provide a SLA ?". For a second the post took me back to 1996, when the web was in it's infancy. Penetration and thus user volumes were low. Application servers were still not properly clusterable and outages were frequent. A quick search revealed that Amazon does have an amazing uptime. According to Webmetrics the Amazon uptimes are:

Web Service	Average Uptime	Average Response Time
Amazon S3 REST API	99.9915%	1.63 sec
Amazon S3 SOAP API	99.9912%	1.55 sec

 

Does all this mean Gartner has to have an SLA when Amazon does ? I think the key is the source of value. Gartner draws it's value almost entirely from proprietary content and from a strong brand built on the idea of proprietary content. Content is king.

Amazon's value is based on transactive sophistication (just check out their one click ordering). and amazing customer service. They don't sell anything 'unique'. They make the buying process somewhat a pleasure and yes the prices are great. Context and service is king.

Now, what happens if Gartner is down and you wanted an article desparately ? You'd have no option but to wait. Even if you find the exact same content freely availaible on the web you still can't use it like you would be able to use Gartner content. To know the difference, just try quoting from Gartner to a client and make the same quote like you are saying it yourself.

If Amazon is down or even slow, a good proportion of customers would simply go elsewhere. With Amazon becoming a cloud player, performance has become even more critical. It's not only Amazon that looses money, but also the folks who rely on their infrastructure.  

Consumer Internet