Service level agreements. This is ultimately, what caused us to have to do it ourselves. There was no amount of money we can give anybody in Southeast Asia, not just Thailand, that will deliver the kind of service level agreement we had to have to put our name on it for a customer. And that really was what the key thing is here, what a service level agreement is and why this matter.
August of 2012, I still have the note written down, is when we figured out that we’re going to have to do this ourselves. We actually had a client placed in Singapore and said alright, there is nobody who is going to be able to deliver us a Service Level Agreement that we can depend on, that we can host our environment in, we’re going to have to do this ourselves, and it has taken us that long to build out that capability in our company to do this. That’s how hard it is to do this. And what we’ve introduced, our own buzzword, we’re marketing now right. SyaaS is systems as a service.
So what is Systems as a Service. System as a Service fundamentally is just an inversion of Platform as a Service model. When you’re using Platform as a Service like Heroku, you build your system to fit the environment that they provide, so you got to go back to look at all those Platform as a Service providers, and you got to review which one has the thing that you most need as a software development team. It’s kind of hard to figure out, because you’re not an operations person yourself. Just like trying to hire software people, trying to hire programmers, if you’re not a programmer. How do you know if you got a good one or not. Answer is you don’t know. So, how do you hire a Platform as a Service company, if you don’t know how to do infrastructure and ops. You don’t know. You can just go base off what people tell you and stuff. It’s really hard. And also you know, you’re dependent on them, what if they go out of business, or they get acquired. Heroku is now owned by Salesforce. They completely changed their SLA.
The other thing that we offer is the first ever general business SLA. Now normally when you’re in this business and somebody says SLA, they’re talking about, we’re going give a 99.8% uptime, and EC2, I have not looked at most recent stuff, but EC2 used to offer like 99.8% or something like that, which just means that their data centre is going to be fine. It doesn’t mean that your system is performant. There’s any logic errors with your system, the way it’s operating, you’re still the person responsible for dealing with that. And you as a business owner, you got a set of core workflows that your users are performing in your system, you really want to guarantee that my workflows are happening. My users are actually able to conduct the business that they are paying me to use my Software as a Service. That’s what we call a business SLA. There are exactly 0 companies on planet Earth that offer that that we are aware of. We’re the first ones. So how do you do that. We’ll get into that.
So ultimately we offer a guarantee of a capacity, which is like a simultaneous number of users who are conducting any sort of transactions at real time, that will respond within a certain number of milliseconds, that will stay up and run for a fixed monthly price. You no longer care about how many machines or how much memory or how much disk space it takes for that to happen. We mange all that. We measure that and we make that happen for you.
So how does this impact you as a business. It’s my crash commercial part here. You got a development team, you got some funding, you’re a startup company. You got some marketing people, you’re system’s been deployed, you got some users, its starting to get interesting and exciting and you’re finding that the utilisation of your system now is hitting its peak capacity and you’re finding out it’s the hardware, because users are experiencing outages. So now you got to make your programmers start focusing on how we make this thing faster, and is it stuff inherent in the code base, is it in the system, where do we do this, how do we know. It starts sucking up a lot of your time. And this is just for you to keep the lights on for your company. This can be more, this can suck up more than your entire development effort really quickly, and this is not your business
So the whole idea of Proteus Ops is, we just take all that off your hands, we mitigate all that risk for you and we do it for a fix fee, so you know what your cost are, you know because we measured it, what your capacity is going to be. So you can say okay, based off our growth, in 8 weeks from now, we’re going to be beyond the capacity that our SLA supports, so we can start planning on what to do to increase that capacity before we hit the hardware. This is what our SLA guarantee is.
So what does System as a Service entail so far. I hope you can read most of the stuff. So the challenge for our business, in selling our business, is when we tell people we do custom operation, we do boutique operation which was the first way I was describing it, everybody thought, they said, well we’re already on AWS, we already got hosting. AWS is one little thing on the top left corner, It’s one little tiny piece of what we do, Everything that’s up here, and this is actually not updated, every capability that’s up here is what we are doing now for clients today and it’s growing. So this is what Systems as a Service entails. Providing all these capabilities for you at a flat rate. And this is what you, all these things that are there, is what you need as a Software as a Service. Either you got to do this yourself or you got to find somebody to do if for you, or some combination of both, which is usually what the right answer is.