Still, industry experts agree that, little by little, both buyers and SAAS vendors are recognizing the importance of SLAs, so business managers should find securing them progressively easier.

Enterprises leading the way

Help is coming indirectly by way of large enterprises, which initially limited their SAAS deployments to small groups and individual departments but are now extending their rollouts, sometimes companywide, says Forrester analyst Liz Herbert.

As a result, though business managers with little software-purchasing experience often used to be the only people negotiating with SAAS vendors, now IT and corporate procurement departments are getting involved and extracting more service guarantees from vendors, she says.

As vendors -- such as Google, with its Apps Premier -- set their sights on the enterprise market, they are hearing the message that feeble SLAs won't cut it there, says Eric Berridge, co-founder of Bluewolf, which provides consulting services to large companies adopting hosted applications.

"Google is probably 12 to 24 months away from being considered an enterprise play with Apps. They need to work on the SLA piece," Berridge says, adding that the suite's SLA must be extended beyond Gmail for enterprise acceptance. Bluewolf, a Google partner, is certified on Apps Premier deployments and is itself a satisfied user of the suite, whose uptime it considers solid. It also does consulting for customers of Salesforce.com and other SAAS vendors.

SAAS applications have so far been used for important processes -- including office productivity, e-mail, customer relationship management, project management, and human resources operations -- but they're not as common in industrial-strength operations in which downtime is outright deadly, such as back-end stock-trading systems and real-time point-of-sales transactions. When SAAS gains more traction in that critical application area, robust SLAs will follow. "When we get to that point in the SAAS market, you'll see a whole new type of SLA emerge," Berridge says.

Those and other factors will move the SAAS market toward stronger SLAs. "It's going to be an evolutionary process, driven a lot by customer demand, competitive pressures, and the specific nature of applications and their target audience," ThinkStrategies' Kaplan says.

Already, some SAAS vendors are adopting aggressive SLA postures. Mailtrust, which provides hosted e-mail primarily for small businesses, offers a 100 percent uptime guarantee. "We want to make it known to our customers that downtime is just not acceptable," says President Pat Matthews.

Mailtrust, which is backed by parent company Rackspace, a managed hosting specialist, also doesn't lock customers into long-term contracts, but rather renews the engagements on a monthly basis. Thus, dissatisfied customers can walk at any time, with no penalties.