When purchasing computer hardware for your business, system availability is a major consideration. While you hope it will remain reliable, you need to manage the risk that at some time a critical system component will fail. Of course by taking measure to replicate of-site, we reduce this risk, however, we may still need to provide more processing resource if we have failed over temporarily, or we may need equipment to rebuild our original production and restore to normal service as quickly as possible.

Many assume that the standard manufacturer’s warranty will adequately protect them. But the ‘small print’ of standard warranties can result in less than satisfactory results for businesses. Even expensive warranty uplifts may not deliver adequate protection against these costs.

Response Times 

One of your systems fails, so you call the warranty-provider’s telephone hotline and speak to an operator in a call centre – perhaps overseas – who simply takes a message.

If the failed system is under a ‘next business day telephone response arrangement, then your staff could be unable to do their job for a day or more before the warranty provider even gets around to diagnosing the problem. And with a ‘best effort’ onsite response, it could be several days before an engineer arrives.

If the system loss has company-wide impact then the implications are even more serious. Standard warranties only cover you during working hours –so a failure on a Friday afternoon could leave your business crippled well into the following Monday.

Businesses that can’t afford this sort of downtime should look to specialist third party support providers that maximise system availability by tailoring support arrangements to meet your specific business needs.

Parts Holdings

Response times are irrelevant if you then have to wait for parts to be shipped from interstate or overseas. Equipment manufacturers generally hold replacement components for warranty service in a single location nationally. As a result, you may be waiting for 24 to 48 hours while the part you need is shipped, delivered and installed.

A maintenance provider which is focussed on maximising system uptime holds spares locally to shorten delivery times. We’re partnered with various third party providers, that stock sufficient local spares, and offer 24x7 engineers that can attend the site with the appropriate part in hand to further speed the repair process.

So, is a standard manufacturer’s warranty really good enough for your business?

The good news is that specialised and highly-focused third-party hardware maintenance solutions are available to solve this problem.

Your maintenance agreement can be tailored to meet your specific operational needs and risk management strategy. Paid on a monthly basis, we can offer you better cash flow and operational flexibility – for around the same in many cases lower as a manufacturer’s warranty uplift.