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by mauinakaoi
by kat6600
by littledragon
I consider the service aspects of a purchasing contract to be vital. What you save on purchase price may end up costing you more because the vendor will pad the maintenance aspects of the contract.
As previously mentioned, your service levels are critical to determining what type of maintenance service you require, including vendor response times and service coverage hours. Make sure what the vendor offers meets your business requirements.
Find out if your vendor provides standby components that can be swapped-in when a failure occurs and consider redundancy issues (and don't forget DR requirements!) Are regular preventative maintenance and health checks included in the overall cost of service or will the vendor charge you everytime they step on site? For large enterprises, some vendors assign dedicated support technician(s) to your company. Many large vendors have a variety of fee-based options to choose from - ask to see all the options. And remember that vendors are often willing to negotiate many of the fine points to get the deal, so try asking for what you want, even if it isn't in their standard contract.
Also consider performance and capacity monitoring. Can they provide this for you or do you have to do it yourself. The vendor may be able to handle these cheaper and easier than you, for additional fees. Also, consider the cost of buying your own network monitoring hardware, software and performance specialists versus the cost of contracting thevendor for your network monitoring and management processes.
Finally, in this age of company-takeovers, make sure that your terms and conditions will be carried over to a new owner, should this vendor be acquired by a bigger player or your maintenance contact gets outsourced by the vendor to a third party.
by kat6600
by kat6600
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