IT IS CLEAR THAT businesses need to leverage the Internet to drive revenue and to streamline operations, but how well the technical infrastructure facilitates achieving these goals is anything but obvious.

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A Burlington, Mass.-based start-up called Brix Networks is looking to bring verification to the SLAs (service-level agreements) businesses sign with their IP service providers.

Compared to established network services such as frame relay or leased lines, the reliability of IP services is difficult to measure, giving businesses little insight into the effectiveness of their SLAs.

Brix this week is unveiling a line of hardware devices and software services that are designed to let companies more accurately gauge the performance of Internet-based services.

"We're in the Dark Ages of SLAs at the moment. During negotiations, carriers offer as little as they can get away with. Enterprises don't know what to ask for and usually get crude measurements and little remuneration when carriers don't deliver," said Jim Slaby, an analyst at Giga Information Group, in Cambridge, Mass.

The Internet was fostered in an environment, namely government and academic agencies, where "best effort" performance was acceptable. But now businesses are betting the future of their companies on the Internet and need assurances on network uptime.

Brix is in test trials with seven carriers that are running the BrixWorx software for provisioning, monitoring, and auditing services. Verifiers, small (6 inches by 8 inches or rack-mounted) devices that measure network performance, are installed at customer sites.

With the system in place, customers can get reports on performance and measure network latency of applications such as Web access or e-mail in greater detail than they can with a simple testing application such as PING, Brix officials said.

Placing the devices at the edge of the network helps troubleshoot problems and allows businesses to implement SLAs that measure end-to-end performance rather than simply the network core.

Companies now typically build home-grown applications for this purpose by modifying network management platforms. But a system focused on the external network will allow companies to introduce more accountability in their relationships with providers, Brix officials said.

The SLA verification system will help carriers leverage a low-cost IP infrastructure and allow them to compete on the basis of the reliability of their respective services, according to analysts.

"When something goes wrong, it's always a negotiation, and [Brix] is trying to bring clarity, fact, and data to the negotiation," said Carl Howe, research director at Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Mass.

"It's like the old START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] treaty: Trust, but then verify," Howe said.