The original equipment manufacturer’s (OEM) support for your server, storage or network systems has expired and you are looking for an alternative? Well then, you’ve come to the right place.

When you buy IT hardware for your data centre, you usually get three to five years of full vendor support. But as soon as this OEM support has expired, you realise that the renewal of the maintenance turns out to be significantly more expensive – while the service remains the same.

The reason for this significant price increase is not, as most people assume, the higher failure rate of the hardware, but rather the hardware lifecycle of the OEM: every five to seven years, for example, HPE, Dell EMC, NetApp or IBM bring a new generation of their hardware onto the market. In order to make the new hardware attractive to the customer, the price for the maintenance of the old hardware is increased by a factor of two to four after the first contract. This makes maintenance for the next two to three additional years so expensive that it is more economical to buy new hardware with three years of support included.

But this waste of resources shouldn’t be necessary: Work with a Third Party Maintenance (TPM) provider right now.

As one of the few providers in the TPM industry, we do not exclusively deliver third party support. Depending on customer requirements, we are able to offer both third-party support and Vendor Maintenance. Our customers benefit from this, because although third-party maintenance has many advantages, it also has some limitations.

You bought hardware a few years ago and have now learned that your IT hardware has been set to End of Life or End of Service Life by the OEM.

Problem: The vendor no longer offers support for your server, storage or network hardware.

Recommendation: This is the most common use case for a third party maintenance provider. With End of Life Maintenance, the hardware can remain in business for at least seven more years.

You bought your data centre hardware three or five years ago and would like to continue operating the hardware for at least the same amount of time.

Problem:In this scenario you have to consider two factors.

1. Cost: The manufacturer usually increases the cost of post warranty maintenance by a factor of two to four. This means that the maintenance service with the OEM manufacturer will be more expensive for the next few years than the purchase of new hardware including five years of support.
2. Service availability: You should definitely ask the vendor how long the support for your IT infrastructure will be provided.

Recommendation: If, for ecological or economic reasons, you want to use your hardware in the data centre for longer than the OEM allows, the use of a TPM provider is the best alternative.

The cost problem will be solved by the very low TPM maintenance prices (up to 80 % cheaper), and the service availability also goes far beyond that of the manufacturer.

In your data centre, you use the “best-of-breed” approach or a multi-vendor strategy to run only the best solutions from the specific manufacturers. A common picture in the corporate environment is, for example, the use of Dell EMC storage systems, HPE ProLiant server systems and Cisco network equipment.

Problem: In these multi-vendor environments, troubleshooting, operations management and also contract management become a difficult task. In case of incidents, several support hotlines often have to be contacted and it is up to the IT department to coordinate all vendors. If a problem cannot be clearly identified, the customer has to prove to each vendor that the cause of the failure lies with the vendor. This costs time and causes unnecessary delays in restoring operations.

Recommendation: Consolidating all maintenance contracts under one TPM provider not only keeps maintenance costs low, it also simplifies operations and thus reduces downtime. There is an additional advantage for contract management, as the IT manager does not have to negotiate and consider multiple contracts. This also reduces the administrative effort for the IT department and procurement.

Very software-heavy products such as firewalls, DDoS appliances, WAN accelerators.

Reason: For these products, the annual subscription or software update service makes up the largest part of the service contract. A third-party provider cannot deliver the necessary updates here because it is not the IP owner (intellectual property owner) and therefore has no rights on the software.

Customers that have to perform regular firmware updates due to compliance.

Reason: Periodic firmware updates always include feature updates that the customer must purchase from the manufacturer through an OEM maintenance contract. In the case of third-party maintenance by a TPM, only bug fixes may be updated because the maintenance provider is not the intellectual property owner of the software or firmware. The manufacturer is the owner of the software and has the right to charge for updates.

Details on firmware and software updates can be found in our Software-FAQs.

Purchase of new data centre hardware.

Reason: When buying new hardware, the maintenance packages of the OEM are very attractive and can be purchased almost at net cost prices through skilful negotiations. Only at higher service levels can it pay off to compare the hardware maintenance products of the OEM with those of a third-party maintenance provider. In these scenarios, the software update right should be possible in the first three years via the warranty, the four-hour on-site service is then purchased via the TPM.