SLAs will account for force majeure and WFH from now on

Pranav Pandya, Co-Founder & Chairman, Dev Information Technology deliberates on the future business model. How are the customer contracts undergoing changes as part of the changing business model? Will SLAs be now drawn in a different way?

Work from home obviously is getting established as the new normal. This undoubtedly changes the way we have drawn contracts till date. All the tech and non-tech requisites for such work model will become part of the contract and such requisites also need to be drawn out in a very elaborate way. The idea is to ultimately get the customer develop faith on us by encompassing all these aspects, looking at the new normal. Two sets of SLAs might come into existence eventually one in the normal operations scenario, which we were having before COVID and one involving WFH environment.
The scenario including partially WFH and partially normal operations will exist. So the SLAs will have two parts to it, one addressing to normal operation scenario and the other to WFH. We are all aware that this pandemic is not going to go just like that.

The other specific SLA which will be drawn out around such pandemic situation will be the force clause point of view which has acquired heroic status in the mindset of the legal fraternity.
As per the case might be while we are all in the IT service provider category, the clients that we are trying to handle here have certain dynamics where a balancing needs to be done as much as a force major clause is concerned.

*What will be the growing influence of cloud, edge computing & remote services as the business delivery model in the new setup?

I would like to refer to Alvin Tofler’s Future Shock in this context. Similarly in future, cloud and remote services might come in and in fact in this pandemic many of us really feel that jobs today require very less and fewer people need to be physically present at office. I know there are certain aspects because of which the office does not lose its sheen but overall we all realize that this might be the situation. And this is exactly what Alvin Tofler predicted. Tofffler in 1970, actually talked of the electronic home, the electronic cottages where people need not go out and work with the help of telecomputing. That was the word he used, which be calling for the Internet, Internet power, cloud and remote services. These are all becoming hands down truth today.
Adoption of cloud and remote services is the model during this time of pandemic to a large extent and at the same time we will see more and more adoption in future because the business models are going to change.
We firmly believe that adoption of cloud and remote services along with digital transformation is here to stay. Our opinion in terms of telecommuting or the WFH policies may be 50- 50 from today. But this pandemic is forcing us to see it as an established new normal while we go ahead.