Third Party Maintenance Providers – 7 Services They Must Offer

Third Party Maintenance Providers 7 Services They Must Offer

Third party hardware maintenance providers offer more than just support. They provide a great way to protect your hardware investment after the expiration of OEM coverage, or an opportunity to save support costs after the initial purchase. But before you select a provider be sure to do your homework as data center downtime can result in serious consequences financially.

So with that in mind, here are 7 services your third party maintenance provider must offer:

Maintenance services focus. Does your maintenance provider have a niche focus? They should. A focused provider say with a focus on data centers can bring a better understanding of client needs. They'll be better prepared to deal with service issues and maintenance on mission-critical servers, tape backup or storage devices as example, versus other hardware not standard in data center environments.

Fast response and issue resolution. As in any service business, a slow response is not a welcome trait. Add to that the fact that with many hardware uses especially in data centers a downtime can be devastating. Make sure your provider has a rapid response methodology and commitment in place. You'll be glad you did.

Unbiased hardware support. Most IT environments and data centers run hardware from multiple vendors. You therefor need a third party maintenance provider that is capable of working and supporting more than one vendor. If not, you might as well keep those costly OEM agreements in place.

Experienced, trained engineers. This goes without saying, but you'll want your hardware maintenance provider to be highly experienced and well trained on numerous hardware platforms and brands. The good thing is that if you select a quality provider, the engineer will likely be invaluable given all the issues he's likely worked on and should be able to diagnose the problem and solution pretty quickly.

Total hardware coverage. If you're going to eliminate your OEM agreements in favor of third party hardware maintenance which I think is a good idea then you'll want to make sure that they cover all hardware that you'd need servicing. The last thing you'll want to happen is to find out that they can fix server X, but that other one isn't part of their service offering.

Service transparency. Your third party maintenance provider should be able to give you service transparency via an online dashboard where your service request is at all times. Real time visibility into service status, parts availability, escalation status and alerts can give you added peace of mind during an already stressful situation.

Flexible contracts. Your contract needs to be flexible and able to change and evolve just as your IT environment does. Adding and dropping hardware? It should be just as easy to alter the agreements accordingly.

A good third party maintenance provider can save you up to 60 percent of the cost of OEM agreements, making them worth their weight in gold. Armed with these 7 critical services in mind, you should be able to find a quality provider to help you keep running smoothly while enjoying these savings.

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