Vendor Support Options

Yet many IT managers balk at the high cost of support. "The price of service agreements tends to climb every year," says Lou Anschuetz, network manager at Carnegie Mellon University. "In many cases, it becomes more economical to purchase new hardware than to continue to use the same equipment and continue to pay the support costs. We recently had one case where it was more economical to buy two new units with no support than to keep the old unit and continue to pay [maintenance costs]." This strategy might be viable for other commodity products as well, though it won't work on big-ticket items like high-end servers or storage arrays.

How can your organization choose a cost-efficient level of service when purchasing new hardware and software? How can you compare vendors' support offerings fairly? And how can you benchmark the support received and ensure that vendors are meeting your needs? The questions are simple; the answers, anything but.

Tangled Up in Tiers

Over the past several years, hardware and software vendors have launched an abundance of support offerings, ranging from easy-to-use guides on their Web sites to customized, dedicated service teams. The cost of these services runs a similarly wide spectrum, from free support bundled with packaged products to specialized contracts that cost millions of dollars annually. If you're buying a new product and have no previous experience with it, how do you know what level of support to buy?

Most vendors maintain prepackaged service offerings that correspond to the types of customers and service requests they encounter most often. Microsoft, for example, offers Professional Services, which lets users ask questions at $99 to $245 per query; Essential Services, which provides a set of basic support services at $8,500 to $33,000 per year; and Premiere Services, which may include dedicated Microsoft staff and customized support capabilities, for $51,120 per year.Other vendors offer similar service tiers, though not all are priced so clearly. Hardware vendors tend to base their pricing on number of units, while many software vendors use a percentage of the annual license fee--generally 10 percent to 20 percent. Of course, the largest organizations often negotiate deals, with customized charges and service-level agreements.

Software support often differs by application. Vendors of desktop and packaged software may gear their support services toward the end user or local administrator, focusing on telephone support and Web self-service. Their support offerings are designed to handle high volumes of queries from small installations, and the features and services reflect this. Enterprise software vendors, on the other hand, may offer a wide variety of professional services, including on-site support personnel to aid deployment and integration.

Although software support usually can be handled remotely through configuration changes, patches or e-mailed upgrades, hardware support is trickier. Most vendors can provide remote diagnostic services, but a failed component must be replaced. Some organizations prefer to spend their support budgets on spare and hot-swappable replacements, letting them do a quick change when a problem occurs, rather than rely on the vendor to diagnose and fix the problem. It's a good idea to get hardware support from a local presence so parts and hardware are a short drive away. This is why some hardware vendors, including Cisco Systems, deliver many services through resellers, who can develop their own support offerings.In most cases, the enterprise chooses its tier of support during the purchase process, and the first year of maintenance often becomes part of the purchase price. The IT purchasing team evaluates the critical business needs of the product--and the likelihood of problems that may require vendor support--and makes an educated guess as to which service to buy.

"Mostly, we go by our feeling of whether we are 'taken care of' by the vendor," says James Alcock, IT manager at the Robert Boissoneault Oncology Institute. The medical facility takes advantage of trial periods and delayed-payment agreements to test vendor support prior to completing a final purchase, though such options are not always available. Alcock and his team evaluate the vendor informally on response time, the vendor technicians' availability and experience, the quality of problem resolution and other criteria.

Alcock and many other IT executives recommend assessing the need for vendor support by visiting other product users, preferably in organizations similar to your own. These "customer references" sometimes provide objective data on the need for support and the quality of service for a particular product, often out of earshot of the vendor's sales rep.

It's also a good idea to meet the vendor staff that will be managing your support, experts say. Even if your product support will be provided by a pool of technicians, rather than a dedicated account exec, try to meet a few members of the team before choosing a service tier. If the technicians don't seem knowledgeable or responsive, that's a hint that you may need to go to the next level--or even choose another vendor.

Although comparing product costs and features may be straightforward, comparing vendor service levels isn't. Each vendor has a different means of evaluating customer satisfaction."Vendors all want customer-satisfaction information, because it's an important way to benchmark customer loyalty and the potential for repeat business," says InterUnity Group's Sneider. "The problem is that it's hard to compare them, because they are all measuring different [customer-satisfaction] phenomena."

There is a movement to standardize the means of collecting this data, which would make comparisons more fair. The Association of Support Professionals, a group of 1,100 vendor service staffers across the United States, is developing a user questionnaire that would put some consistency into the customer-satisfaction survey. The trick is to get most vendors to use that common standard.

Vendors that have a good reputation often have a "halo effect" that reflects on users' evaluation of service. "If they have a good reputation and you have a bad experience with their support, you assume that you're an anomaly," notes Jeffrey Tarter, executive director of the ASP. "Vendors with a bad reputation for product quality or service often experience the opposite effect."

Even without IT customer-satisfaction standards, there are ways to compare vendor service offerings, experts say. One of the best is to test-drive each vendor's online support database, which is increasingly becoming vendors' preferred mechanism for problem handling.

"Is it user-friendly? How broad are the online services? Is there an option for online training? If those basic things aren't there, that can be a red flag that the vendor is not up to speed on support," Tarter says. It's also a good idea to run a few trial scenarios against the vendor's maintenance knowledge base, to be certain the data it returns is on target and will help solve problems.In addition, often there are differences in the way vendors deliver their services. Some offer guaranteed response times, others provide guaranteed problem-resolution times, and some promise both. Some vendors offer a regular contact who knows something about the user's environment; others deliver a pool of experts who specialize in different aspects of support. Some provide immediate response on a 24/7 basis; others provide that response only during business hours. The best choice depends on your organization's needs.

For larger purchases, it's also important to evaluate the longevity of the service contract. Some vendors end support for their older products after as little as two years or charge more to support their legacy products. Microsoft recently extended support for some of its older products after great demand from its users.

Once you've selected the level of service and the vendor that will provide it, how do you know if you're getting good service?

"We have done a lot of surveys on this topic, and we have found that though users consistently rate vendor support as a high priority, they almost always rate their vendor services in the 'average' range," Tarter explains. "It doesn't matter who the vendor is or how good or bad its service is--it almost always gets an average rating."

This probably occurs because users have no easy way to benchmark the support services they receive for a product. As long as the vendor delivers against its service contract, the user has no way to tell how the vendor's service stacks up against its competitors. "That's why some vendors are reluctant to put a lot of money into expanding and marketing their service offerings," Tarter says. "Some companies have made that investment without getting much credit for it."Although users may not be able to compare support from multiple vendors, they can measure services received against service levels promised in the contract. And in most cases, the company has defined a process for dealing with vendors that don't meet their promises.

"The first time a vendor does not meet our expectations, we usually have a face-to-face meeting with them to see why they did not perform as expected," said Frank Avanzo, manager of computer services at Goss International Corp., a manufacturer of printing presses and related equipment. "The second time, we will escalate our concerns to someone higher in the organization. If it occurs a third time, our contract's setup allows us to get out of the contract and change vendors with no penalty."

Large customers often create their own service-level agreements with a vendor, specifying availability/reliability rates for critical systems and response-time requirements for each vendor. Although these custom SLAs may work for some enterprises, they go against the grain of vendor service organizations, Tarter says.

"The vendor service process is geared to work efficiently across many customers," Tarter says. "Vendors that are trying to manage to 20 or 30 different commitment levels for different customers almost invariably have a hard time meeting those agreements."

Tim Wilson is Network Computing's editor, business technology. His background includes four years as an IT industry analyst and more than 14 years as a journalist specializing in networking technology. Write to him at [email protected].• Define your requirements. Before you purchase hardware or software, consider what will happen if it fails. Research the reliability of the products in that category. To intelligently choose a level of support, you must know how critical the product will be and how likely it will need maintenance and repairs.

• Include support in your RFP and budget. Many companies choose a technology or vendor based on sticker price alone, only to find that savings are negated by higher support costs in the end. Factor in the cost of the bidders' products over their entire lifespan, not just in the first year.

• Ask for references. Because there are no industry standards for benchmarking one vendor's support against its competitors', the only way to compare vendor offerings objectively is to speak with companies that have used those products. Look for customers that have IT environments similar to yours, and bear in mind that any references you receive from a vendor are likely to be from its happiest customers.

• Take advantage of up-front discounts. Many vendors will give deep discounts on support during the initial sale to gain higher support revenue over the life of the product. But don't purchase support services you don't need.

• Evaluate the performance of the support team. Be sure the service agreement will benefit your organization if there are problems. If the vendor is not meeting its service agreement, you may be eligible for compensation. If your service reps are not effective, many vendors will let you change to a different rep or team. Fill out any surveys you receive--your input is a vendor's chief measure of customer satisfaction.Our Affordable IT section is aimed at helping transcend the business and technology challenges of IT on a tight budget. In this installment, we discuss the possible pitfalls of underestimating and not carefully negotiating vendor support agreements when purchasing hardware or software. We cover the methods for choosing the right level of support for your IT environment and identify mistakes often made in choosing support agreements. We also discuss some research you can do beforehand to help you avoid draining your budget. With some forethought, you can ensure you won't be caught supportless when that shiny new server melts into a pile of expensive molten goo.