Initiative to address outages a sign of broader collaboration in tech sector, says expert

Simon Colvin of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that the launch of a new initiative aimed at developing a new industry standard to cut down on service outages is just the latest example of collaboration in the technology sector.

A number of major technology businesses have come together to establish a new "industry standard to safeguard quality and reliability of IT infrastructure" and will work together through a new trade body, the Zero Outage Industry Standard Association. The body will be based in London and is due to officially launch in Barcelona on 8 November. 

Founder members of the association are Brocade, Cisco, Dell EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Juniper, NetApp, SAP, SUSE and T-Systems.

"Technology companies are increasingly realising that they can benefit from pooling their collective knowledge to resolve common issues that they face," Colvin said. "By working together in this case, the technology suppliers recognise that they will be better able to de-risk future commitments to deliver a zero-tolerance approach to outages, which currently can be very costly to guarantee and usually entails putting in place a range of contingencies at significant cost. Technology customers from across sectors stand to gain if suppliers can iron out inefficiencies and offer 100% service levels through value for money propositions."

Tim Roughton of Pinsent Masons said if the initiative is successful it will bring a number of other benefits to IT customers too.

"As well as the obvious benefit of a more stable and secure service, a new industry standard could smooth the contract negotiation process where common definitions of incident response, outages and security requirements can be adopted," Roughton said. "If the standards are backed-up by a certification process, this will also assist customers with their due diligence on potential suppliers."

In a joint statement the businesses participating in the zero outage standard collaboration said: "The digital world is increasingly dependent on IT. A technical defect, human error or untrained process execution can be a threat to everyday operations. Therefore manufacturers and service companies are growing a sense of urgency for an uninterruptible supply of their services. With the Zero Outage Industry Standard Association, major tech-companies want to start an industry-wide discussion and work out a common understanding of quality."

"The common goal of the group is to maximise availability and customer satisfaction by improving stability and security by defining an industry best practice based on a zero outage framework," they said.

The Zero Outage Industry Standard Association will aim to "specify consistent error response times, employee qualification levels and set security and platform requirements" to "help companies to minimise errors, increase availability, ensure security and operate cost-effectively", the companies said.

Colvin said that there are other examples where technology companies are embracing collaboration, most notably in working towards the development of smart cities.

"Moves to develop smarter infrastructure necessarily requires technology suppliers and bricks-and-mortar infrastructure providers to collaborate and adopt new approaches to contracting," Colvin said. "Technology influences the way buildings are used and how our built environment will operate. It has become vital to consider technology as part of the design phase of new infrastructure projects so as to embed technologies into that infrastructure from the outset, rather than deal with it as an afterthought."

"Such an approach represents a major change from usual practices for technology suppliers who will welcome being involved throughout the duration of an infrastructure project," he said.