Volume purchasing programs can be an attractive way for enterprises to do business with their largest IT vendors – including the Cisco Enterprise Agreement. Large customers with significant levels of Cisco spend may be inclined to default to an EA to help streamline purchasing. But spend size, while certainly important, should not be the only determining factor.

To understand if a Cisco Enterprise Agreement makes sense for your business, it is important to consider the pros and cons of this purchase construct, and the internal dynamics of Cisco’s pricing and sales machines.

What are the benefits of a Cisco Enterprise Agreement?

For most customers, the decision to enter an EA with Cisco is largely driven by cost. If you’re procuring multiple products a la carte, you’re probably missing out on valuable discounting that’s only available to EA customers. EAs are also an easier way to source with Cisco from an administrative perspective, removing the barrier of repetitive steps of procurement. The Cisco EA serves as a single purchasing and support vehicle. That’s important for large customers that could otherwise have multiple support agreements to manage and negotiate. Customers also consider EAs an opportunity to consolidate like technologies from multiple vendors to a single vendor in order to reduce the number of relationships and technologies to manage.

The notion of moving to an EA often originates with Cisco – not the customer. And Cisco does a good job of making sure EAs are positioned to quickly “make sense” to the buyer. For example, if a customer is purchasing Cisco’s firewalls, and also considering the vendor’s Umbrella or IPS solutions, the EA becomes more attractive to the buyer and captures low-hanging fruit for the Cisco sales team.

While financially and administratively beneficial, a Cisco Enterprise Agreement does have its risks. Most notable is the inclination for customers to put all their eggs into one basket. Why bring other vendors into the mix when an EA makes it cheaper and easier to buy from Cisco?

First, it’s advisable for some customers to pursue a best-of-breed approach for critical network, UC and infosec products and services instead of a single vendor approach (which is easily fostered by an EA). Multi-vendor is also IT procurement best practice. Competition means more buy-side negotiation leverage as well as the ability to create redundancies or load-balance as dictated by the customer’s unique network/security requirements. Second, vendor lock-in can be costly in the long-term. A good deal under an EA now may not be so great if a better performing and lower cost solution comes around.

Overbuying is another risk inherent in a Cisco EA. Like a lot of enterprise IT vendors, Cisco likes to bundle its offerings with little visibility into line-item pricing. This typically results in the customer buying more than they need, accruing shelfware, and ultimately driving up support costs over the long run (a perfect recipe for toxic spend). To fend off overbuying, customers should demand line-item pricing transparency, benchmark pricing against similarly-scoped peer purchases, and negotiate smaller bundles that best fit their requirements. Note that Cisco usually does not allow for licensing swaps.

Another thing to note is Cisco changes “the rules” every year for its entire sales organization. Customers are served by a core account team as well as technology-specific sales specialists, with both groups having their own compensation structure and incentive programs that change year to year. While customers with an EA may receive attractive volume purchasing discounts, they run the risk of missing out on some of the unique deal incentives that come from purchasing from different sales specialists.

How negotiable is a Cisco Enterprise Agreement?

NPI has analyzed thousands of Cisco purchases and renewals. Our experience indicates that while Cisco sticks to a pretty rigid discount range (which makes it all the more important to purchase only what you need and to pay a fair price from the onset of your EA), there are certainly customer situations where it’s possible to move the needle on savings.

Committed spend is a big one – the more you can commit over the term of a Cisco Enterprise Agreement, the more leverage you have. For enterprise clients, sales teams are often willing to make an internal case for better pricing over multiple rounds of negotiations and escalation. Marquee logo account penetration, replacing a major competitor (this is a big one), a major hardware purchase, a divestiture – these are all examples of circumstances where material savings can be achieved if meticulously negotiated.

What are some other ways to achieve savings?

There are other ways to increase leverage in Cisco EA negotiations, but they’re highly specific to the buyer’s business case, prior history with Cisco, and unique technical and business requirements. For example:

• Does your IT roadmap create substantial opportunity for Cisco to grow its footprint?
• If you’re an existing Cisco customer, have you experienced a lot of support calls? If so, what areas? Are you paying for more support than you need?
• Can Cisco offset IT costs in other ways such as providing additional implementation services or fixing an issue at no charge?

There’s also opportunity to leverage Cisco’s bundled offerings for better pricing – albeit with a few considerations. Like a lot of enterprise IT vendors, Cisco has bundles for its entire portfolio. In recent years, it’s broken its larger bundled offerings into smaller bundles. Today, many customers are choosing smaller bundles to avoid the waste of unused or underutilized offerings that often accompany larger bundles. The discount percentages aren’t quite as competitive compared to larger bundles but can still be attractive. There are two downsides with committing to bundles:

1. The inability to swap out or remove unused products at renewal time.
2. Lack of SKU-level visibility into pricing – Cisco is renowned for not sharing pricing down to the SKU level and it’s not uncommon for its own reps to be kept in the dark.

Advice Before Entering or Renewing a Cisco Enterprise Agreement

Have additional questions about the Cisco Enterprise Agreement? NPI’s IT procurement advisors can help – we are not a reseller and our guidance and expertise are 100% unbiased and objective.

It’s that time of year again, where IT and IT procurement teams find themselves eyeballs-deep in a flurry of software renewals. With fiscal year-ends approaching for dozens of enterprise IT vendors, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Heck, considering all of the nuances of each software renewal, it’s difficult not to.

The problem – aside from the stress of it all – is that this is when the seeds of IT overspending are sown. There are few things more profitable for a software vendor than a hasty renewal or one executed on autopilot. Our advice to IT buyers this year is to slow down and commit to developing a solid negotiation strategy for each renewal on the docket. If that sounds too ambitious, then start with renewals that comprise the largest spend and work down the list.

Fundamental Questions to Ask Before Developing a Vendor Negotiation Strategy

The acceleration of IT buying over the last couple of years has caused many companies to bypass IT purchasing fundamentals. That’s a mistake that typically moves negotiation leverage to the vendor even before the deal is on the table. To be sure you’re negotiating the software renewal you need (versus the deal your vendor wants you to have), ask the following questions:

• What do we change about what we bought?
• Are we utilizing the licenses that we purchased?
• Do we have the “best-fit” licenses for our use cases?
• Did we get a good price?
• Do we have a have a future-state roadmap?
• How do we build in the ability to adapt for future needs?

All this may sound very 101’ish, and frankly like common-sense. But answering these questions paves the path to accurate demand definition – and that leads to a right-sized (and fairly-priced) software renewal.

Key Sources for Developing Your Software Renewal Negotiation Strategy

Admittedly, answering the questions outlined above is an easier-said-than-done endeavor. It takes digging, time and deep understanding of each vendors’ licensing metrics and terms, and ultimately may require outside resources that specialize in enterprise software renewal optimization. Regardless of how you choose to map out resources, it’s important to perform the following activities.

1. License Optimization Assessment – What’s being used, unused or underutilized today? This establishes the starting point of renewal demand definition so that elements in your renewal can be right-sized.
2. Contractual Assessment – Does your contract include best-in-class business terms? Where can you negotiate greater flexibility to ensure your agreement meets changing business and technical requirements?
3. Fair Market Value (FMV) Analysis – How does the vendor’s pricing compare to similarly-scoped deals in the marketplace? It’s an important question and, unfortunately, most IT buyers only have visibility into their own historical pricing data – not what other companies of similar size/industry have paid for similar purchases.
4. Demand Forecasting – How will demand for a vendor’s offerings change over the term of your agreement? This typically involves numerous conversations with key user groups and stakeholders to understand a potential change to the current estate either in license quantities, growth projections, user types, license types, and new expansion opportunities.
5. Determine Most Desired Outcomes (MDOs) – Here’s an obvious fact: IT vendor negotiations are an exercise in compromise. Neither the customer nor the vendor gets everything they want (not usually, however). That’s why it’s important to prioritize desired outcomes. This will keep you – and your vendor – honest during negotiations and ensure you’re meeting your most important purchasing objectives.

Remember, your vendor has been plotting how they can extract more revenue from your software renewal since the ink dried on your last agreement. The questions and activities outlined above are designed to help you come to the negotiation table with the same amount of power and focus. You may be tempted to skimp on preparation because you’re short on time or bandwidth, but don’t – it can cost you millions. Expert resources like NPI can help you streamline these activities to ensure flawless execution of every software renewal.

Enterprise IT vendors tend to have vast partner ecosystems and aggressive strategies to monetize those relationships. One example is the “marketplace” – a single point of entry where customers can easily purchase from multiple solution providers.

The marketplaces hosted by Google Cloud and AWS continue to grow and have an influential effect across the broader cloud provider landscape. UBS estimates the AWS marketplace could be delivering $1 billion to $2 billion in revenue to Amazon. Meanwhile, as of mid-2021, the Google Cloud marketplace offered ~4,600 products and services and continues to grow at a healthy clip.

Different Approaches to Credit for Enterprise Buyers in the Google Cloud vs. AWS Marketplace

One advantage of marketplace purchasing for large enterprises is that Google and AWS allow dollars spent within the marketplace to count towards a customer’s annual spend commitment volumes. In the Google Cloud marketplace, dollars spent within the marketplace are applied on a 1:1 basis against spend commit. AWS, on the other hand, only offers a 50 percent credit for spend within their marketplace.

From a discounting perspective, NPI has observed Google to be somewhat flexible in the discounts it offers for term versus annual spend commitments. This is good news for customers whose spend may ebb and flow over the duration of their contract term, but still meets term commitment thresholds. AWS behaves a little differently. While offering less credit towards your spend commitment, AWS tends to base discounting on annual committed spend rather than term. A large committed spend volume that remains flat in a year-over-year situation would typically earn the same levels of discounting.

Marketplace Purchasing Advice – Understand AWS and Google’s Motivations Before You Proceed

The marketplaces continue to add more and more “traditional” vendors under their tents, with pricing that rivals the legacy channel. Both the vendors selling their wares in the marketplace and the cloud marketplace hosts like AWS and Google have been aggressively pushing customers to purchase via this new method.

But there are some drawbacks that customers need to be aware of as marketplace hosts leverage their marketplaces differently and in alignment with their unique motivations. Comparing the Google Cloud vs. AWS marketplace isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. A thorough understanding of the motivations and costs for all players is advised. Another consideration is if and/or how licensing and terms of service change when purchasing through a marketplace versus directly from the vendor.

A solid deal (including pricing) today may ultimately cause future headaches if not carefully planned.

ERP implementations remain one of the most complex and expensive IT projects for large enterprises. A recent report from Software Path found the average budget per user for an ERP project to be $8,265. Other data suggests ERP implementation costs for large enterprises start at $1M to $10M and up to 200 percent of license fees, and go up from there.

In this blog, we are using the term “implementation” broadly to encompass both technology and services costs for first-time or replacement ERP projects. With so many IT dollars on the line, many IT and IT procurement leaders are seeking ways to rein in the cost of their ERP implementation projects. In this blog post, we share six pragmatic ways enterprises can reduce ERP implementation costs and ensure they receive maximum value from their technology and implementation partners.

ERP Implementation Costs: 6 Cost-Reduction Solutions

Determine Accurate User Counts with Future-State Requirements in Mind

Subscription fees and/or license fees will be a large chunk of your ERP implementation spend. While it’s tempting to only license for what you need today, it’s important to anticipate changes in user counts over the next three to five years. Building those projections into your initial scope may give you leverage to negotiate additional users at a lower price point than you would pay if you added them on the fly down the road.

Another best practice is making sure you segment users into different profiles based on usage requirements. This analysis allows you to determine which users truly need a “power user” license (typically at a higher cost) and which are better suited to lower-cost license types.

When determining user counts, also keep implementation and roll-out timeframes in mind. Your vendor will likely push you to start paying for all users on day one. Consider “ramping” up to your full user count over the term based on how long it will take to get the solution implemented across the enterprise. The goal is to not start paying for all users until the solution is fully implemented and rolled out.

Demand Line-Item Pricing Visibility

Vendors love bundled pricing. It obscures their pricing strategy, while giving customers one number to process. But, as we often say at NPI, mystery equals margin.

There are a number of elements to an ERP implementation project – license/subscription counts, training, data migration, support, configuration, customizations, integrations, add-on features/modules, and more. Bundled pricing makes it difficult to understand how much you’re paying for each element and if that price is fair (more on that in the next section).

Our advice is to demand line-item pricing in each of your vendor quotes. This data will help you better understand the cost of each element, identify savings opportunities, and produce a true apples-to-apples comparison for competitive evaluation.

Benchmark Pricing – One of the Most Effective Ways to Reduce ERP Implementation Costs

Now that you’ve got accurate user counts and line-item pricing, it’s time to determine if you’re being quoted a fair price by your vendor. Keep in mind what your vendor quotes you can be significantly more than what they may quote another customer with similarly-scoped requirements, and significantly more than what another vendor with similar functionality will charge.

Performing IT price benchmark analysis often reveals material savings – seven-figure savings are not uncommon for large enterprise ERP projects.

Leverage Your Vendor’s Cloud Roadmap

The future of ERP is in the cloud. And that’s generating a whole new crop of ERP implementation projects for customers old and new. Legacy vendors are highly motivated to migrate customers away from on-premise solutions to cloud offerings. Similarly, many enterprises are adopting a cloud-first IT roadmap and are eager to bring critical business systems into alignment.

In some cases, the deal window is still open for customers looking to leverage their vendor’s motivation– agreeing to move to the cloud may make room for better pricing and other concessions across other portions of the vendor’s footprint. Regardless of how open the window is, customers need to align their IT roadmap with that of their ERP vendor. Not getting on board at the right time can lead to higher costs in the long term.

Right-size Professional Service Resources and Aggressively Negotiate Rate Cards

Accelerated transformation, cloud migration, and heavy-lift solution implementations and upgrades have caused services spend to spike with vendors like Capgemini, Infosys, Deloitte, Accenture, Cognizant, TCS and others. NPI’s data shows enterprises overpay 10 to 25 percent above market for certain service rate card line-items.

It’s imperative that customers do two things in advance of an ERP implementation to reduce overspending risk on services. The first is to right-size resources to specific project/task elements. The most expensive resources should not be performing tasks that a lower-cost resource is qualified to provide.

The second is to perform IT price benchmark analysis on professional services rate cards. For those customers with material spend across multiple service providers, another option is the creation of simplified rate cards (SRCs). By standardizing and categorizing roles, and establishing pricing targets based on roles and experience levels, some clients have reduced aggregate fees for planned projects by as much 25 percent.

Beware of Custom Solution Implementation Pricing

Out-of-the-box ERP implementations are rare, but your “custom” solution may not be as custom as you think. Some SIs and implementation partners use templates that divide the total proposed hours into predefined percentages of the various resource levels – whether you actually need those resources or not.

To reduce ERP implementation costs, we echo the advice shared above – challenge the need and deliverables for each resource type to ensure you’re paying for only the resources required.

NPI Helps Customers Materially Reduce ERP Implementation Costs

There is ample opportunity to make significant reductions to ERP implementation fees. NPI’s IT price benchmark analysis services help customers break down the complexity of ERP implementation pricing and determine pricing targets that are at or better than market. We also provide negotiation support to increase leverage and secure the most favorable outcome possible during vendor negotiations.

If you have an ERP implementation on the horizon, contact us. Our IT pricing and negotiation analysts can help you identify material savings opportunities.

As companies adapt their IT ecosystems to changing business requirements, the cost of change is becoming harder to gauge. More specifically, it’s becoming harder to determine if companies are paying a fair price for these changes. It’s worth revisiting certain IT budgeting best practices that govern this aspect of IT sourcing.

One is identifying the true cost of doing nothing – otherwise called the Business as Usual (BAU) comparison. For example, if your vendor is sunsetting support for a certain product, the cost to “do nothing” and remain on outdated software can be significant and should be factored into whether it makes sense to upgrade. But, in other cases, BAU comparisons can be fraught with false assumptions.

Understanding the Drawbacks of BAU Comparisons

BAU comparisons are often used as sales tools to help vendors generate additional revenue. When vendors are pushing their customers to move in a particular direction that is advantageous to them, they will commonly show a BAU comparison along with the proposal they would prefer the customer to move forward with. We see this frequently with vendors trying to convince customers to move away from perpetual licenses to the cloud, or when vendors want to move customers into an enterprise agreement.

What many customers don’t realize is that many vendors drastically inflate the BAU model cost. Customers then use the inflated (BAU pricing to make the EA or move to the cloud seem more attractive.

When presented with a BAU comparison, it’s important to ask how confident you are that you received strong pricing on the current deal you have. Many times, NPI has found that the current deal is priced higher than fair market value, which is a fundamental flaw in the comparison of the cost of doing nothing versus moving to an EA or moving to the cloud.

There are a couple important metrics to be aware of when reviewing and comparing a new proposal from your vendor against a BAU proposal:

• NPI typically observes, and would expect, that an EA should provide a 10 to 20 percent benefit (or possibly more) over a fair market value BAU estimate.
• As a general rule, which can vary depending on circumstances, a subscription will cost approximately one-third of the on-premise cost. As such, determining whether the current cost is within fair market value is critical to knowing if the proposed SaaS costs are favorable.

BAU, FMV and IT Budgeting Best Practices

Before considering any BAU cost comparisons, IT procurement practitioners should perform IT price benchmark analysis on current agreement pricing. This will ensure an accurate baseline for decision-making. Furthermore, it’s important to apply that same analysis to BAU pricing to ensure this pricing is indeed at least within fair market range. The savings can be material – NPI’s objective price benchmark analysis services reveal savings opportunities on over 80 percent of purchase quotes that our clients submit for review. Resultant savings range from 10 to 50 percent (or more) .

If you’re a Salesforce customer, there is a good chance you will be renewing your agreement with the vendor within the next six months. That makes now an ideal time to strategize how you can save on your Salesforce renewal – a solid strategy is most certainly required.

Salesforce claims to be the fastest-growing enterprise software company in the world. In its last fiscal year, the company’s revenues grew 24 percent to $21.3 billion. Customers include over 90 percent of the Fortune 500. Like a lot of IT vendors, Salesforce largely benefitted from the pandemic as companies leaned into investing in a remote, connected workforce. Furthermore, acquisitions like Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack have enabled the vendor to expand its enterprise footprint. The end result is what IT vendor executives’ dreams are made of – deep customer entrenchment and a clear path to doubling revenues in the next five years.

But the company’s appetite for growth has been costly. Internal pressure to increase profitability on every customer transaction is unusually high. Acquisition absorption has made pricing more inconsistent. And as Salesforce becomes more ingrained in the enterprise, many customers are losing sight of what they “own,” what’s actually being used, and how licenses are being managed.

This brings us to an irrefutable point – customers must go into their next Salesforce renewal more prepared than ever and with full visibility into the blind spots that lead to overspending. To accomplish this, customers need to focus on two cost-saving activities.

#1 – Assess Actual Usage to Identify Opportunities to Right-size or Liberate Licenses

As discussed in this white paper on how to eliminate toxic spend on large SaaS estates, SaaS cost waste is a pervasive problem – particularly for Salesforce customers. Reasons range from shadow IT to poor license management to ineffective SaaS management tools.

Another reason? Renewals tend to happen on autopilot. Customers rarely validate renewal requirements based on actual usage. They simply renew what they have and buy more. Inevitably, customers end up with bloated Salesforce estates and costs that grow exponentially from renewal to renewal.

A license optimization assessment is the first step in breaking the cycle of overspending. It thoroughly assesses your current state of usage to identify licenses that can be terminated or harvested for redeployment (thus avoiding/minimizing the need to purchase new licenses). Cost savings are typically identified in two areas:

• Rightsizing license assignments for certain users. Instead of defaulting to a standard license type (which typically offers more functionality than many users need), customers can identify opportunities to switch to more cost-effective license types.
• Liberation of license currency. Visibility into usage data helps customers spot inactive licenses that can be terminated or redeployed. These can be no-pulse users consuming valid licenses (a printer or coffee machine – yes, it happens!), former employees and contractors, users assigned to multiple active licenses or inactive users.

#2 – Optimize Licensing, Pricing and Terms within Your Salesforce Renewal Agreement

Now that you have a fact-based usage baseline for demand definition, it’s time to optimize your Salesforce renewal agreement accordingly. Which mix of licensing options will best fit your verified usage requirements and projected future demand? What are the cost implications for different licensing scenarios? What licensing strategy is optimal for your technical and business requirements over the full term of your agreement? Answering these questions will ensure you buy only what you need and select the best-fit license types for your user profiles and business model.

Another component of this exercise is building in protections that reduce cost risk over the term of your Salesforce agreement. It starts with performing IT price benchmark analysis to make sure you’re being quoted pricing and discounts that are either at or better than fair market for all the unique components of your renewal. Business terms such as compliance-related language, SLAs, data ownership, etc. are also areas that need to be optimized for cost avoidance.

Attack Your Salesforce Renewal with Confidence

There are two assumptions baked into Salesforce’s revenue model. The first is the complexity of the customer’s footprint – the bigger it is, the harder it is to manage. The second (a byproduct of the first) is most customers will approach their renewals with some degree of overwhelm or apathy.

The strategy outlined above neutralizes these assumptions and charts an easy road to savings. Here are a few examples of how NPI has helped customers save on their Salesforce renewals:

NPI’s SaaS License Optimization Assessment and Enterprise Agreement Renewal Optimization services can help you eliminate cost waste across your Salesforce estate. If you have a Salesforce renewal coming up, let us know.

Our enterprise clients often ask how much weight to put on IT service level agreements when sourcing a new supplier or service. This is never an easy question to answer and largely depends on how business-critical the service is, or the goal of the SLA in question. Enterprise IT ecosystems are vast and the criticality of one IT vendor versus the next varies – a network provider or wireless carrier may carry more weight than a MarTech software vendor.

The recent outage at Fastly serves nicely for this discussion. A web acceleration supplier, Fastly had an outage on June 8th that negatively impacted multiple websites (Amazon, Reddit, Spotify, eBay among others) and brought down the websites of several news agencies (BBC, CNN, New York Times) as well as the government website GOV.UK.

The root cause was quickly identified and service was restored within several hours – but the outage itself certainly triggered SLA violations and resulted in customer credits. Fastly’s published SLAs for Gold or Enterprise support indicate that a period of “Degraded Performance” lasting longer than 43.8 minutes but less than 7.2 hours results in a credit equal to 10 percent of the monthly cost of service. One of these large customers could be spending $500,000 a month for the service and thus get a service credit equal to $50,000.

But how does that compare to the cost of the outage? In instances like this, do IT service level agreements really deliver meaningful compensation?

A Forensic View into the Value of IT Service Level Agreements

It’s nearly impossible to accurately quantify the cost of an outage (particularly for major telecom and network outages), but there are ways to get a sense of scale. The New York Times averages over 350 million page views per day with 80 percent of that traffic coming from the U.S. Just averaging this over an 18-hour day translates to about 20 million page views per hour. So, in the four or five hours of “degraded” service provided by Fastly, the publisher missed out on nearly 100 million page views.

If the NYT has two ads on each webpage, then they lost out on 200 million impressions. At a cost of $3 per 1,000 impressions, then the outlet missed out on $600,000 in ad revenue. These are very rough calculations, but they demonstrate material revenue loss for which only a fraction was repaid in service credits.

How much should this type of calculation influence the negotiation of IT service level agreements when making a purchase? It is commonly known that an enterprise customer will never recover the cost of an outage through service credits – which makes determining the right amount of weighting challenging at best.

The reality is that there is no single right answer or best practice. The general concept is that SLA penalties should be painful enough that the supplier invests adequately to avoid paying them. As of the end of 2020, Fastly had 324 enterprise customers generating average annual revenue of $782,000, or an average of $65,000 per month. With a 10 percent Service Credit per customer, this puts the total credits Fastly paid for the outage at $2.1 million.

This may be expensive enough for Fastly to make an effort to determine and remediate root cause so that it does not happen again, but it is probably not enough to dramatically change the company’s business model. What if the penalty for an outage up to 7.2 hours was 100 percent credit of the monthly cost? That’s a different story. This effectively would have cost Fastly eight percent of their annual profit. This still would not adequately compensate customers for lost revenues, but it is enough to get the attention of investors and more likely to cause sweeping improvements.

Pragmatic Negotiation Advice for IT Service Level Agreements

Full compensation for service level breaches is near impossible – and there are many more performance metrics at stake than revenue (e.g. time and resources, brand reputation, security implications). But there are some things customers can do to be more adequately compensated and to pave a clearer path to recourse.

One thing NPI recommends is escalating the cost of a repeat offense. In other words, if the service credit is a full month fee on the first occurrence, then it may double if it happens a second time within a quarter or three times in a year.

Also, the more critical the service is to a client’s own revenue, the more significant the SLA needs to be. One mechanism to support this is to make sure there is an appropriately fast escalation path to the point of contract breach and that threshold is firmly established.

If you have questions about how to better negotiate IT service level agreements, NPI can help.