The Great Hardware Maintenance Escape

Hardware maintenance solutions from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can feel like a prison. That’s because they aren’t typically based on a lifecycle approach. In addition to commonly charging more than third-party maintenance providers, OEM’s traditionally offer end-of-service-life (EOSL) dates for equipment much too early. Once a product reaches EOSL, the OEM maintenance agreement expires and the covered product is essentially deemed replaceable by the OEM—without a careful analysis of its actual condition. The benefit for OEMs is profit: they sell their latest products. The benefit for the customer not as easy to see. Smart IT leaders are forgoing the maintenance agreements offered by the OEMs and are instead looking for one vendor who can provide better support at a lower cost.  Here are 3 reasons why.

One:  Mulitivendor maintenance will help you optimize your ROI

The right multivendor maintenance provider should be able to advise you on which networking, storage and server hardware should remain on OEM maintenance, be replaced or be moved to a multivendor maintenance agreement. The recommendations by the vendor should be backed by data on your hardware performance as well as include high-quality maintenance parts. And, unlike OEMs, the vendor’s receommendations are based on the actual condition of your equipment, as opposed to EOSL guidelines. This allows you the freedom to use your products for as long as possible and avoid the expense of unnecessarily replacing perfectly good equipment. In this way, you can optimize your ROI far beyond the typical three-year OEM warranty term.

Two:  Simplify your technical support strategy with a single point of contact

If you rely on several service providers for your hardware maintenance needs, you know that managing multiple vendors isn’t always easy. It can be time consuming and complicated to monitor multiple contracts and service level agreements (SLAs). Even accessing support can be challenging, especially if your in-house resources are burdened with determining the source of the problem beforehand. A multivendor maintenance offering from one vendor helps you save precious time by providing both problem determination and support services. And with just one price and one contract, you can ease administrative and budgetary challenges. Single-source support for a server, storage and networking hardware should also be considered.

Three:  A budget friendly service to help boost uptime and reduce costs

Given increasingly shrinking IT budgets, OEM maintenance can be cost prohibitive. Yet, maintaining non-stop uptime is essential. What you need is around-the-clock level 1 and 2 support, which includes problem determination and part replacements. The right provider will offer highly skilled and experienced technicians and a robust infrastructure to deliver support. In the end, you benefit from more cost-effective services without sacrificing the advantages of OEM maintenance—such as speedy access to parts and world-class expertise. Costs are further reduced by the available lifecycle-based support recommendations and tailoring services accordingly. In this way, you gain an optimally performing IT environment that’s designed to be more budget friendly overall to maintain. You can enjoy all of this value for one fixed price to help simplify both budgeting and accounting administration.

Flagship Solutions Group offers maintenance services on hardware from vendors such as HP, Hitachi Data Systems, Dell, EMC, Oracle-Sun Microsystems, Brocade, and more. We partner with IBM to provide Integrated Multivendor Support (IMS) to provide the highest qulity of service available in the industry. Why do we only support this select equipment? It’s simple: We don’t service products that should be on OEM maintenance or replaced (and, of course, our support service helps you distinguish between those products). So, chances are, if you have non-IBM hardware products that have aged out of OEM warranty, you can rely on Flagship —as opposed to several vendors—to support them.

Schedule a consultation today to learn more about multivendor maintenance services offered by Flagship Solutions Group.

If you liked this blog, you might also like: The Right Vendor Isn’t Always the Original Vendor

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