The proliferation of service providers offering a wide array of hosted services has once again brought SLAs (service-level agreements) to the fore. The industry has long tried to measure performance of online applications in business terms, but the technology has generally lagged, particularly on the Internet. InfoWorld Executive Editor Martin LaMonica spoke to Trent Hein, the CTO of Xor, to discuss how his company is trying to make the Internet a more reliable platform for deploying business applications.

InfoWorld: How do you define the work that you do at Xor?

Hein: Our core business is around applications and systems management. As I'm sure you're aware, that part of the industry is really interesting right now, because the traditional client/server model, where the industry developed application management pretty well, is [already] understood. Things like service levels are commonplace. Some aspects [of Internet applications] behave like client/server applications, but in this distributed world other aspects of them are completely different.

InfoWorld: What has changed since the client/server days?

Hein: We no longer have the problems that we had, say, even five years ago where you were worried about hardware redundancy. We have RAID arrays. We have [similar backups] with routers and switches. We have all the operating system and infrastructure layers that allow an individual site to provide a level of redundancy where you can guarantee service levels. Today, we have a new problem: It's so distributed, you've got maybe six, seven, eight network providers on a common path between the central host of an application and the end-user. But you need to manage services levels across that [path]. Managing applications of performance level across that [path] is a whole different ball game.

InfoWorld: What is one of the big sticking points with SLAs via the Internet? What can service providers do to address that?

Hein: Today it's kind of a black box. Most of the companies you go to, they'll say, 'Well, we'll be happy to provide you a service, but we're going to monitor your box from this box that sits across the room and we'll make sure that the [connection] works well all the time.' Unfortunately, that doesn't give you very good insight into a lot of things. ... Where we specialize is in instrumenting applications, instrumenting networks, so that we can see all the different layers and then have ways to monitor and manage that to meet the user's needs.

InfoWorld: What's the end goal of adding this instrumentation into applications?

Hein: At the end of the day,

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