The Google Apps Team has sent out an e-mail to customers promising a full SLA credit for Apps Premier customers for the month of August to cover for a series of outages on the 6th, 11th, and 15th. Most users were not affected by the issues on the 6th and 15th but Google is nonetheless awarding a blanket credit as a sort of mea culpa recognizing the lackluster way in which all of the outages were handled on the customer service front.

Following the general pattern for widespread SaaS provider outages, Google has now seen the same light as Salesforce and Amazon before it and promises to deploy a system status dashboard "in a few months" which will allow better communication during potential future problems. The system will provide a description of the probelm and an estimated time to resolve, addressing two of the most common complaints surrounding the August outages, where information from the company was hard to come by and neither systematic nor sufficiently descriptive when it arrived. And, although it may be closing the barn door after the horse is out, Google promises in the future to provide a 48-hour post-mortem on the incident to provide more transparency on both the root cause and their steps to resolve it, and to make themselves available for post-mortem calls with customer IT and management teams.

This is a striking and surprising move from Google, which has suffered consistent criticism over its ability to deliver the type of support traditionally expected by enterprise customers. Conventional wisdom holds Google as being too aloof, too egotistical, and insufficiently enterprise oriented in culture to deliver the sort of customer support required to break into the enterprise service provider market. Moreover, it has been widely speculated that they didn't, and maybe shouldn't, even care to do so. The culture of secrecy in the company has long counted against it with CIOs responsible for vetting technology business partners; when your job is at stake, you don't just want to take someone's word that their operations are reliable, you want to see it for yourself.

This promise, however, while far from being made good yet, represents an unsuspected level of motivation with the company to run the Apps service, at least, at a level which enterprise customers could come to rely on. Providing an SLA is a first step; providing sufficient transparency for prospective customer CIOs to gain knowledge of Google's internal processes and operations and gain confidence in them is the next. If Google can deliver, they may get a more serious look from CIOs who had written off Apps as another perpetual beta experiment.