99.5% SLA for on-demand web-based PLM service

All users of Arena Solutions’ on-demand extended PLM (product lifecycle management) environment, which covers full product definitions across company, department and time boundaries, now get a 99.5% uptime guarantee for the service. Launched last month, it follows a review of the service over the last five years, which shows 99.6% so far. “We looked at the investment we’ve made in our primary and recovery sites, and we believe we’re in a position to be able to offer this new SLA [service level agreement],” says Eric Larkin, Arena CTO and co-founder. “This is for all our customers, big and small, and there’s no fee. We have big system coverage, warm, full capacity disaster recovery, Fortune 500 software deployment, and we ought to be taking advantage of investment we’ve made,” he adds. He suggests that not only is this good for existing users, but for those considering the on-demand, hosted approach who may doubt its stability for a critical PLM environment. “We have achieved this extraordinary service level over five years of delivering the service,” he says. “It’s not just talk. Our business depends on making this service available all the time.” He also scotches popular misconceptions like dubious PLM security. “It sounds counter intuitive but service providers’ businesses depend on the security of their offerings so they make investments which far exceed feasible individual investments. “We have 200-plus companies and 8,000-plus users – so a very high level of investment in security that includes continuous vulnerability scanning, all servers upgraded to the latest patch level, 100% protection of customers… And you know, partitioning of data within a secure infrastructure is not a new art: managing access to data based on user authentication is not one of the more technically challenging parts of our business. “We approach it very like a banking business. Each customer retains ownership of that data. Each customer session is associated with only one set of customer data. If they switch domains to a different workspace they have to re-authenticate to re-establish security. So we have system and application level security. We have the most secure PLM system n the market. We have to.”