There are many third-party maintenance providers. They are not all made equal, and it is not a simple task to select the right one. Every customer has different requirements, but these are the five main areas to focus on when selecting a maintenance partner.
Are they invested in your strategic outcomes?
Can they help you accurately assess the risk of moving to a third party?
Do they have the technology platforms to ensure systems can continue to be supported?
Will their technical and engineering capabilities meet your data center needs?
Do they have the required regional, national, or global reach?
At CDS, we have helped many customers that initially selected a partner simply based on price and ended up in challenging situations with extended downtime of critical systems and applications.
Are they invested in your strategic outcomes?
At CDS we collaborate with our partners in order that customers can achieve their strategic modernization objectives. We do that in part by unlocking spend in the data center, and enabling customers to redirect that spend to higher value programs, projects, and outcomes. In addition, we help customers move quickly by applying life cycle services. Our experienced engineers assist customers in deploying new infrastructure for private or hybrid clouds, help migrate workloads to new target solutions, and complete data wiping, destruction, and decommissioning of legacy infrastructure. With our Multi-Vendor Services (MVS), we are invested in the success of the customer. TPMs hope your modernization journey takes as long as possible. Success for a TPM is holding onto your legacy infrastructure, not helping you move to new solutions.
The right partner will be invested in your strategic outcomes, will provide services to help you get their quickly and will have flexible support options to enable you to remove legacy infrastructure from support when you need to.
Can they help you accurately assess the risk of moving to a third party?
As part of our Multi-Vendor Services capability, we provide our partners with a risk assessment on moving network, compute, and storage infrastructure to MVS. This assessment is multi-faceted, but hinges on understanding where the infrastructure is in its lifecycle. The newer the system, even if it is end of support, the more diligence that is required on parts availability. Importantly, the same applies for patches and firmware. We are often asked by customers if we have the ability to apply new patches to systems, and we are occasionally asked in the context of the customer having been told by a TPM that the TPM has the capability to apply firmware and patch updates. While there are efforts underway to change the rules surrounding this, particularly in Europe, today it is not permissible for a third party to apply patches or firmware. If you are working with a third party that suggests they can apply patches or firmware updates, this should be a red flag. The same applies to a maintenance provider that states they will provide support for all infrastructure, regardless of the lifecycle stage.
Do they have the technology platforms to ensure systems can continue to be supported?
Often, TPMs are not permitted to utilize the OEM software for supporting and maintaining the system. CDS’ Raytrix MVS platform provides secure remote access, intelligent call home, and advanced monitoring through MVS Insight. Our engineers and service delivery teams are able to describe and demonstrate in detail how Raytrix MVS is securely deployed. Any third-party maintainer should be able to do the same with the tools they will deploy and be able to clearly demonstrate that they will not infringe on any OEM intellectual property.
Will their technical and engineering capabilities meet your data center needs?
Organizations are moving away from fragmented support models that involve multiple different vendors, processes, phone numbers, email addresses, and ticketing systems. With Multi-Vendor Services, the customer has a single point of contact for any support requirements across the entire data center. In order to achieve this, while maintaining service levels and not impacting mission critical workloads, the maintenance provider must have the technical expertise and the parts inventory to service a range of infrastructure across network, compute, and storage.
Do they have the required regional, national, or global reach?
It is important to understand if you are partnering with a maintenance provider that has global reach, has a national focus, or is a local regional organization. This in turn needs to match your organization’s requirements. If you are partnering with a local maintenance provider but have national or global support requirements, this increases the risk that the provider will not have adequate parts access or technical support availability – impacting SLAs and ultimately system and application uptime.
Summary
Selecting the wrong maintenance provider can have a very real and negative impact on an organization’s business.Selecting the right maintenance provider can be a significant enabler of an organization’s modernization journey, and can help an organization meet those objectives faster than would otherwise be the case.