Service Availability Yields Value in Finance and Banking Sectors

By Alan Meyer, SA Forum

It was recently announced that Twitter and Google Calendar have been struggling with availability. This news resonated with the SA Forum, as it raises the impact of availability far beyond its usual scope.  The unavailability of such extremely popular services affects millions of people around the world. As ever more people depend on networks for everyday personal and business activities, uninterrupted service becomes both more critical and more expected.

For example, consider the financial and banking sector. Last April, a stock market dip affected website availability for sites such as Yahoo! Finance and Fidelity.com as consumers rushed online to make trades and check their investments. Upset consumers used social media sites such as Twitter to report the inaccessibility. One user complained, “Your site not working cost me some serious dollars.” Delay in service for a site where every second counts, such as an online brokerage, will surely cause consumers to at least consider switching to competitors with more reliable platforms. 

Compare the situation with the state of telecommunications service. Landlines and cell phones have a very high level of service availability due to the use of equipment designed with that criterion in mind. To achieve the level of availability commonly provided by the telecom companies, financial companies struggling with uptime may need to consider the platforms and software used in telecom equipment.  This could lead to far larger markets for high-availability middleware based on SA Forum specifications. 

Telecom and military/defense customers have been increasingly turning to such solutions to achieve benefits such as reduced costs, faster time-to-market, and more satisfied customers. The same value proposition now applies to enterprise networking, Internet services, and cloud computing.

After all, people use online services such as Google and Yahoo! Finance or online brokerages because of their ease-of-use and rapid accessibility. If customers experience downtime, much of the value proposition is lost. Those companies that deliver services with reliable uptime will retain customers. The lessons learned long ago by the major telcos will hold also for leading-edge players such as major websites, online brokerages, and other new service providers.

Alan Meyer is Marketing Work Group Chair at the Service Availability (SA) Forum. He is also Director of Telecom Platform Software at HP.  You can reach him via Mary Slonske at mslonske@nereus-worldwide.com.