Your Support Contract is more important than ever

The COVID-19 experience has been an eye opener for many IT managers and business leaders. It rapidly became apparent how quickly business objective can be brought to a halt, with little notice and with conviction. During these times of uncertainty, your support contract just became your best ally, and you should make sure your support contracts are up to date and renewed.

Your company needs to focus on business continuity and increasing sales, revenue and profit while giving your customers a superb experience. The last thing you need to be concerned about is hardware failure, or downtime due to unforeseen failures. Especially when you are placed in a stressful situation such as the coronavirus pandemic. During these trying times is not the time to be left vulnerable to downtime because your customers are counting on your services more than ever.

We are experts in HPE support contract renewals and conversions from carepack to contract. We will help you with Nimble Support, Primera, Proliant, 3Par, Aruba, Apollo, Moonshot, Superdome – well; you name it, we cover it.

There are several levels of support available to you such as Foundation Care, Proactive Care, Datacenter Care.  All of these come in different SLA's or response times to better meet your specific needs and budget.

Each support contract is quoted individually and there is no published list price. The best way to start a contract is to have a list of all the serial numbers you need covered. It is also possible to cover hardware form other vendors such as CISCO, Dell, EMC, and NetApp. If your hardware still has an active contract, whether it be from a previous contract, or carepack, that is ok.  It can still be added to a support contract and you won’t pay double for the support.

If your equipment has always been covered with support (no support lapse), you should not see an RTS (“Return to Support”) fee. The RTS fee is designed to cover for the period the equipment was out of support. This fee makes sense, especially for equipment with software updates such as 3Par and Primera.

Anatomy of an HPE support contract:

The most important parts of the support contract are the SAID (“Support Agreement ID”) which is used to reference the contract. Additionally, the contract should list every serial number (if not listed in the contract, it is not under support). And finally, the level of service and the duration of the support. Each one of these variables are modifiable and negotiable. The minimum support contract is for one year, but we have seen some exceptions, and those can be handled in a case-by-case basis.

You can co-term multiple contracts to make the renewal process of all your infrastructure easy and the periodicity easy to manage. So, if you have equipment purchased at different times, you can place them all under the same contract and co-term the renewal so you can renew only once for all your infrastructure.

At Westham, we notify you of a support contract that is about to expire 90 days before expiration. In my experience, 90 days is enough time to start the renewal process since some customers take several weeks to decide on the renewal.  Activation time on a renewal is usually less than one week.

HPE support contracts are usually considered as operational expenditure, and customers can choose from a range of payment profiles such as yearly, quarterly or in some cases monthly. As you can see, we do our best to cater to your business making support contract availability as attainable as possible.

Uncertain times brings stress and preoccupation. Do not let your infrastructure add to that stress by ensuring your support contract is current and renewed. Rest assured that your business is protected, and business continuity is prioritized with an HPE support contract in place.