Since the hourly cost of downtime can exceed $100K, it goes without saying that the reliability of online services is mission-critical for business and enterprise customers.
Contents
A Closer Look at Stacktical
Stacktical is a French technology company specialized in predictive Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Service Level Management (SLM).
The company operates the DSLA Network, a platform that enables online service providers to transparently commit to reliability objectives on the blockchain and instantly compensate their customers using the DSLA cryptocurrency token when reliability objectives are not met.
There’s no such thing as 100% Uptime
In 2018, more than 80% of corporations required a minimum 99.99% uptime commitment from their online service providers. That’s exactly 52 minutes and 35.7 seconds of downtime per year.
Service Level Agreements or “SLA” are legally-binding business agreements that define the ins and outs of such commitment.
Used in the telecommunications industry for the past 30 years, they set measurable reliability objectives for the delivered service, and they predefine remedies, such as downtime compensation, for when these objectives are not met.
But while shared objectives and remedies help align the risk a business is willing to bear with the engineering capabilities of its provider, the cost and complexity of using service level agreements limit their adoption and undermines their mission as a framework.
“The problem is that offering and maintaining service level agreements is very labour-intensive for providers. The entire agreement portfolio must be defined, negotiated, deployed and monitored. When a service level violation is detected, the manual enforcement of policies generate a lot of customer support overhead that also translate into a massive waste of time for customers. Traditional Service Level Agreements can easily be a net negative for all involved parties.”, explains Wilhem Pujar, CEO at Stacktical.
From SLA to Smart Contracts
By turning Service Level Agreements into Smart Contracts, Stacktical hopes to remove the intermediaries and streamline the processes that are currently preventing SLA from driving business value to their stakeholders.
The Decentralized SLA network that the company is building will enable service providers to automate the management of agreements and enable the instant, claimless enforcement of their policies. This is demonstrated through Stacktical’s Proof-of-Concept offering.
Customers will get instantly compensated for delays and outages without manually collecting downtime proofs, submitting claims to the provider’s help desk, and engaging in back and forth discussions with customer support agents until such claim is deemed valid and financially settled.
With little to no staff involved in managing SLA anymore, providers will be able to focus on reliability engineering, effortlessly scale their SLA portfolio and reap the benefits of using SLA without operational overhead.
Meet DSLA, the Downtime and Delay Compensation Token
Stacktical plans on enabling online service providers to use escrows of its own Decentralized SLA ERC-20 token, the “DSLA”, to instantly compensate their customers for Internet outages. The Parisian team is currently raising 1M€ in their token sale to further develop their international customer pipeline and Fortune 500 licensing effort.