As you drive your car, drink a beer, place a call, or buy clothes, luggage, champagne, makeup or perfume, chances are one of Europe’s top brands is making it possible. Just recently, the European Brand Institute released its Eurobrand2011 study, examining more than 3,000 brand corporations in 24 countries and 16 industries, with comparisons to America and Asia.

As a European company ourselves, we look to brands that have achieved global status as an inspiration for what is possible. Certainly the workplace management market potential is substantially smaller than global consumers’ thirst for beer, consumable goods or cars, but we aim high. Curious as to who are this year’s top ten European brands? Here’s the list:

1. LVMH: whose portfolio of prestigious brands like Tag Heuer, Dom Perignon and Louis Vuitton represent “the most refined qualities of Western ‘Art de Vivre’ around the world.” (I would hazard a guess that your average IT manager doesn’t contribute to LMVH’s bottomline.)

2. Vodafone: Did you know that Vodafone made the first ever mobile call on January 1, 1985? Today, the company has more than 371 million customers around the world. What started out as a small mobile operator has grown into a global business and the seventh most valuable brand in the world. Can you hear me now?

3. INBEV: Budweiser, Stella-Artois, Becks…. If you are a fan of these popular beers, then you’ve contributed to the global success of the Anheuser-Busch InBev brand. The $36.3B company manages a portfolio of more than 200 beer brands and holds the number 1 or 2 market position in 19 countries. Cheers to that!

4. Nestlé: This brand’s mission of “Good Food, Good Life” is to provide consumers with the best tasting, most nutritious choices in a wide range of food and beverage categories from morning to night. The company was founded in 1866 by Henri Nestlé in Vevey, Switzerland, where its headquarters are still located today. Today, it employs around 280,000 people. Chocolate is good for you, it appears.

To continue reading, please visit: blog.matrix42.com/content/beer-cars-and-...

If you’re a company looking to reduce operational costs then you’ve likely investigated using a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service model.  Of course, before you signed the deal and essentially gave part of your IT over to outside hands, you likely studied the service-level agreements (SLA) of potential vendors.  The SLA is a key factor for many companies in choosing which vendor to go with. 

OK, so you’ve carefully validated your SLA terms and it all looks great.  If you have an issue down the road with your vendor and data is lost, you’ll be in good hands according to your SLA, right?  Well, I’m not so sure.  

Let's talk about a real case example. 

Everything works fine for awhile after you move email to one of the biggest SaaS providers in the space.  But Murphy's Law, as it often seems to, rears its head and everything goes wrong on a Friday.  Because of a technical issue on the vendor’s side, you lose all of your company's email.  You look at the bright side, though; it’s Friday afternoon and there is plenty of time to recover.  As some of you might know that from past experience, it normally takes about six to eight hours for email server recovery.  Not so bad, right?  Wrong. 

The first warning sign: the SaaS vendor support says there will be a 72 hour recovery time (for around 500GB). Wow, that's a long time. If the problem resided within your own IT department, you could do this much faster.  OK, now you’re hoping for Monday morning. 

Then Monday comes and you’ve received no information from vendor support because they can’t communicate with the vendor hosting team that’s working on your case.  By Monday afternoon you’ve made several calls to the vendor – still nothing.  Monday evening, you guessed it – nothing.  You're getting crazy – your business needs email!  You're looking every hour to your iPhone hoping for an update...nothing. 

Tuesday morning and you still have no email.  It’s becoming Code Red at your organization – what now?

To continue reading, please visit: blog.matrix42.com/content/do-slas-really...