Posted on Wednesday, July 13, 2016 in Third Party Maintenance
Third party maintenance is a leap into the unknown for those businesses who have always relied on OEM support. And out of this uncertainty, dozens of myths have sprung up specifically designed to stop your organization from moving to a cheaper third party provider.
In almost every way, third party maintenance (TPM) providers offer the same (or better) support to that from OEMs. But this week we are going to look at one instance where OEMs and third party providers are very different – contract terms.
One size has never fit all
As you would expect, OEMs push their customers very hard to accept Level 1 support contracts for as much of their equipment as they can – after all, the cost of 7×24 support contracts with a 4-hour response guarantee helps the vendor recover any product ‘discounts’ quickly and effectively.
Every purchase involves a whole new contract, and you will come under pressure to purchase Level 1 support each time. But the fact is that at least some of your acquisitions are not intended for mission critical applications – so they don’t need to be covered 7×24, and they certainly don’t require a 4 hour on-site response.
You are already paying more than you need for your support and maintenance.
TPM – providing much needed flexibility
A third party support provider tends to be far more flexible with their support contracts. Whether you want a blanket Level 1 contract to support all of your storage assets, or a unit by unit approach with varying levels of coverage, a third party maintenance partner is far better placed to assist.
More importantly still, choosing a TPM provider allows you to build custom coverage contracts for all of your storage assets, regardless of manufacturer. So although contracts become more granular, the administration is easier and cheaper because they are all with a single party.
Obviously not all third party maintenance providers are the same, but when you partner with CDS you get:
- Typical cost savings of between 40% and 70% on your maintenance costs.
- The opportunity to define support levels and response times that properly align with your business priorities and budgets.
- You determine problem severity and receive the proper response to meet your business objectives. 4 hours onsite truly means onsite and your environment does not have to be hard down to receive this service or pay a premium.
All of which means that your storage assets are better protected, and you have a budget surplus that can be reinvested in other key projects, such as cloud adoption or IoT deployments.
For more trustworthy help and advice on why your business should partner with CDS for third party maintenance sooner rather than later, please get in touch.
– See more at: http://www.cds.net/news/2016/07/inflexible-contract-terms/#sthash.gqOHfmfd.dpuf