In the current climate IT managers are coming under increased pressure to cut their budgets and manage their resources more effectively. One of the first things that a cost conscious IT manager will consider is how to cut down his maintenance budget. One of the most effective ways to do this is to look at outsourcing to a third party.

It’s a big decision to make, so what do you need to look for when considering outsourced IT maintenance?

• Speed of response. One of the key performance indicators for maintenance companies is how quickly they can respond to your calls. You need to make sure that the maintenance company has the resources in place to meet your demands and that they can stick to a service level agreement.
• Manufacturer expertise. If your company has a room full of IBM computers, you will need to find a company with expertise in IBM maintenance. While there might not matter for the bulk of your equipment, for mission critical servers you will want the reassurance of going to an expert. When you are reviewing prospective maintenance partners, ask them to provide manufacturer training certificates.
• Geographical coverage. This is a key factor. It’s not realistic to expect a company based in Cornwall to support a mission-critical server farm in Dundee. Many companies claim to have nationwide coverage but you’ll often find that this is not the case. If you’re assessing potential maintenance partners, it’s important that you understand their speed of response to your target locations as that’s the only thing that really matters.
• Access to parts. If your equipment is old and out of warranty, one of the most important services that a maintenance company can provide is access to obsolete equipment. One of the key things to check is whether your potential partner has a large inventory of obsolete parts. The more they have, the better this is.

More and more companies are outsourcing their IT maintenance. If you want to ensure that your equipment is well maintained and serviced it pays to do a few quick checks

Recent data that was published by an IT manufacturer shed some important light on the decision making processes that were involved in selecting IT support services. Here are the decision criteria in order of importance:

1. Expertise. While much of the IT market is now a commodity there are still many specialist niches. The most important single factor that all decision makers agreed on was technology expertise. All interviewees stressed that they expected an IBM maintenance company to have expertise in IBM technology.
2. Access to parts. Many key infrastructure systems run on older technology and all respondents agreed that it was crucial that a maintainer had access to replacement parts. This entails a large inventory of obsolete equipment.
3. Speed of response. Surprisingly this was not ranked as a critical factor. However, all respondents expected a response time to be built into a service level agreement.

While the data did suggest some surprises, one thing was clear. Selecting a maintenance partner is an important procurement process that involves many departments and decision makers. In our experience, all of the above factors are critical but there are a number of other important criteria that didn’t appear in the report:

• Personal relationships – we pride ourselves on making sure that the customer knows their engineer and that there’s a single, continuous point of contact. A recent survey we did within our own customer base suggests that this makes a huge difference to customer satisfaction.
• Multi-vendor support – this comes back to the question of expertise. Most of our customers have a range of equipment from a range of manufacturers and it’s increasingly important for them that we can provide support for all of their suppliers. It’s a one-stop shop approach that reduces their overhead and simplifies their maintenance load.