Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has voluntarily changed the service level agreement (SLA) for paid users of Google Apps, removing clauses that allowed the company to schedule maintenance downtime. In a blog posted on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, Google Enterprise product management director Matt Glotzbach declared that the change was because "we don't plan for our users to be down."

The modified terms will result in all downtime to be counted and applied toward the customer's SLA. In addition, outages lasting less than ten minutes will also be tallied as downtime, a departure from Google's stance in the past that ignored intermittent downtime.

Google's goal, Glotzbach wrote, is to attain a level of reliability akin to a phone's dial tone, with its cloud-hosted applications. He quoted figures from the Radicati Group's new report, "Corporate IT Survey--Messaging & Collaboration, 2010-2011," which noted that the average on-premises email system is down for 3.8 hours per month. Based on those figures, Google's Gmail is 46 times more reliable than Microsoft Exchange, says Glotzbach.

I've not seen the report, though it could be a case of comparing apples and oranges. For one, it is likely that downtime metrics for on-premise email were obtained from companies, which would automatically include problems with Internet access or network-related downtime, aspects that aren't considered with Google's Gmail. More importantly, while the services offered by Google are comprehensive, they are hardly on par with a full-fledged Exchange or Lotus Notes deployment.

Still, Google clearly recognizes that its unique architecture lets it eliminate planned downtime altogether, and is leveraging it to the hilt.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Google Enterprise Blog
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at Datamation

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