Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Buillt into the support plans are comprehensive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which further detail our commitment to supporting our customers. Factored into these agreements is the severity of the situation and an outline of how we propose to resolve the problem.

During the problem determination phase of a support incident, factors that determine the severity level are ascertained. Responsiveness is then scaled appropriately (see tables below). The “Response” column of the Support Classification table above refers to responses to Severity Level 1 incidents. SpringSource reserves the right to extend response times if an incident’s severity is deemed less critical than Level 1.

A support escalation procedure is in place to ensure that the appropriate level of expertise—up to and including interaction with the developers of the software —is applied to the problem at hand.

“Severity 1”:

• An error in the software which severely affects the overall production performance of the software’s function or process, such that a production system is non-functional and no procedural work-around exists.

All involved parties will work continuously on Severity 1 problems until a work-around or system recovery is successfully implemented and either the case is closed or the severity is reduced.

“Severity 2”:

• An error in the software which materially affects the overall production performance of the software’s function or process so that the function or process is noticeably impaired, but where business operations continue.

The objective is to provide a resolution to Severity 2 problems by a reasonable date agreed to by the Customer.

“Severity 3”:

• An error that does not materially affect the overall performance of a production function or process. This may include a minor issue with limited loss or no loss of functionality or impact to Customer's operations.
• Response times for Level 3 also apply to development support, documentation errors and general usage questions.

The objective is to provide a resolution to Severity 3 problems by the next scheduled Update or in a future feature release.

Service level agreements define the maximum time to initially respond to the Customer’s report of a problem, the time for a workaround or patch, and the time for a permanent correction to the problem, if applicable.

The tables below defines the service level agreements for the 3 plans, for each of these activities, based on the severity of the problem.