It’s all too easy for a customer to oversubscribe their maintenance capacity, wasting budget and potentially damaging their own careers. AOM helps customers balance their service level requirements with their available budget, making the most of what they have.

 

 

Criticality.

If there’s any one element of IT Service Management (ITSM) that can help balance your total maintentance spend with your available budget.

Evaluate Your Installed Inventory

If you’re maintaining a comprehensive and accurate inventory of all installed units there’s a relatively simple evaluation you can perform that will help you identify opportunities to reduce your spend by adjusting the subscribed service level agreement (SLA) appropriate to the criticality of each unit.

The first key is to not fall into the “default” trap. You’re obtaining new coverage, extending your warranties, or renewing an existing contract. You make sure everything in your installed base is listed, check off same-day-response, get your price and process the order.

It is more than likely that you just threw away money.

If you look at each unit in your installed inventory, you’ll soon realize that many of the devices you are covering with maintenance protection aren’t used all that much. Or, you could wait longer to have them restored to full function. You don’t need same-day-response, or faster, for these less critical units.

Had you specified a lower SLA you wouldn’t have been charged as much, and wouldn’t be paying as much month after month after month.

Depending on the size and configuration of your data estate this could end up saving you a major proportion of what you’re paying for a high SLA across the board.

How to Customize SLAs for Savings

First and foremost, don’t do it alone. Work with representatives from your service provider to identify which units are high criticality, and which are not.

Even servers may not be critical if they’re not support critical applications, so you need to dive down into each server to the application level and determine what workloads are being supported. Those handling workloads that don’t require rush can afford to wait should service be required.

A sales representative from your provider’s staff can advise you as to how much you’d save on each change of SLA. With the AOM Portal, they can instantly obtain a maintenance fee based on desired SLA for each device in your inventory. A service manager will help you interrogate your installed inventory so you can evaluate and characterize each unit. If your service provider uses a platform like the AOM Portal which maintains your inventory for you that takes a major task off your hands.

When you’ve identified the appropriate SLA for each device and calculate your new annualized costs don’t be surprised if they’re substantial. This one step can cut your costs by as much as half in some environments.

Ask for AOM

The Alternative to OEM Maintenance (AOM) system releases you from the stranglehold for OEM-provided services, replacing them with far more reasonable prices and a far broader selection of highly-qualified service delivery experts. We leverage the vast resources and highly-responsive interface of AOM to provide you with the best possible service at the lowest possible price.