AKIBIA'S PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Wrest Control of Your Data Center Back From the OEM
In the past few weeks I've met with a number of really big, exceptionally successful companies. These companies are leading edge in nearly every way—innovative data centers that employ virtualization, and deliver high availability, mission critical services on a global scale, and yet in one specific way, they are not revolutionary at all. They are still being held hostage by the OEM when it comes to software support contracts – resulting in unrealized cost savings and under-performing service on servers and storage systems.
Most companies think you can not get an OEM software support contract without a hardware support contract. Why do they think this? Because they've never pushed the issue. If someone told you the sky was green today, wouldn’t you go outside and look to be sure?
When it comes to support contracts take the extra step of asking the vendor to quote software-only support, and then ask for a better price when they come back with premium-only options.
I guarantee you the first time that you ask Sun, for example, for software-only support they will come back with a number of scare tactics. Companies like Sun will tell you this will impact your warranty, they will tell you it will impact future discounts and that you can only buy the premium version. Stick to your guns and negotiate a software-only support contract. Because in the end, it wont affect any of these issues. In the end, they'll want to keep you as a hardware customer and they will still sell you great technology at good prices.
How do I know this? Because for 20 years, every one of our global 1000 customers has fought this software support battle with the OEM and come out on top. Many of our customers stregthen their data center and their bargaining power by leveraging multiple OEMs in their environment, rather than leveraging a single vendor for all systems. As a result the vendors are too scared of losing the hardware sales opportunity to fight with you over the support contract.
After taking charge of their OEM relationship, these companies are capitalizing on a whole new opportunity for better hardware maintenance service and more customized and flexible SLAs at reduced costs, from third party maintainers.
Some of the biggest companies in financial services, technology, and bio-tech have fought this battle with the OEM and won.
Besides software support contracts, what are some other ways you are taking back control of your data center support plan and your overall data center budget?
