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.

 

 

Flexibility. Choice. Advantage. Convenience. Savings. All valuable things everyone wants. All things that the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) of your computer equipment denies to its customers, like you.

Kiss Your Budget Goodbye

OEM warranty extension and other maintenance services are consistently the highest in the industry by far. The OEM embarks from the position that they have no competition. When they speak with you they speak as if you have no other choices, everybody buys OEM maintenance. That’s not true.

In fact, most OEMs prefer a new product sale to a maintenance sale. It’s part of their pricing strategy to make it not worthwhile to service something you can just as easily replace. That’s only true if you buy into their being your only choice.

They may say they’re the only one who can service their equipment, but the reality is that the only equipment they can service is their own. You’ll still need to seek elsewhere to have other equipment in your data center serviced. In addition to being the most expensive service source, that high price doesn’t buy you everything you need, so you still need to spend more.

While we’re on the subject of the OEM saying they’re the only ones who can service their equipment, look under the covers. Many OEMs outsource Tier 1 and Tier 2 support and only handle the most difficult problems themselves. This is a cost-saving measure on their part. So they’re charging you a premium for their own “genuine OEM” service but that’s not what you’re getting.

And if you have any special circumstances that require a custom-designed support program, you can forget about that. It’s not something OEMs do. They have a SKU list of service options for you to choose from. That’s it.

You Want Choices. You Need Choices.

One important falsehood we need to dispel immediately; there is nothing an OEM can do for you that a quality third-party maintenance (TPM) provider cannot. Nothing. Software upgrades? Patches? Spare units? Parts for outdated equipment? A quality TPM provides all this and more.

A quality TPM services most or all the brands you have in your installed inventory. One call really does do it all. No finger-pointing or blaming of others. The quality TPM takes responsibility for your entire infrastructure and charges you significantly less than the typical OEM charges just to cover their own products.

You want choices when it comes to Service Level Agreements (SLA). Some of your installed devices may be critical to your operations, while others are not. Why pay the same rate for critical and non-critical equipment? You can save a great deal by accepting a lower SLA on those devices you can be without for a period of time. Try that with an OEM. It’s not going to happen.

You want choices when it comes to replacement parts. The OEM will always use expensive “genuine” OEM parts. A quality TPM knows who actually manufactured each part for the OEM and sources it from them at much lower cost. Or, if you specifically prefer, they’ll use OEM parts. You get to choose.

Another choice you’d really like to have is the choice whether or not to replace equipment when it reaches end of service life (EoSL) or end of life (EoL). The OEM will push hard to replace their discontinued models. The TPM will give you the option and can usually support identified products long beyond their EoL.

What if the TPM Doesn’t Cover Everything?

This is the question that inspired AOM – the Alternative to OEM Maintenance.

It’s unrealistic to think that any one TPM will cover everything in a given infrastructure, or that they will be able to deliver service everywhere you may have locations. You need more than a TPM. You need many TPMs.

AOM makes the largest selection of high-quality TPM service providers available to you for every service request. You simply enter the request into the AOM portal and the system identifies the best possible TPM to provide the services you need, dispatches them to get it done, and tracks the event to completion.

It’s like having thousands of TPMs at your fingertips. In fact, that’s exactly what it is.

Say No

As hard as the OEM may try to terrorize you into buying their maintenance agreement, talk to AOM first. Get the OEM’s quotation for their coverage so you can smile broadly when you see how much you save with AOM.