Profitable businesses require the ability to forecast support costs across various timelines so they can plan projects appropriately. Without this ability, businesses struggle to forecast support costs accurately or in a reasonable amount of time. Therefore, you should provide asset line-level costs for current contracted products normalized to an annual or monthly period.

Be sure to track the relationship between hardware and software support licenses. You want to view individual support contracts with detailed information, based on real-time data. Then you can compare asset inventory support coverage across different manufacturers using generalized levels, compared across project, location, or application dimensions. Link hardware and software resources together to illustrate connections between software licensed to specific application environments.

Next is the last blog in the series and will discuss determining if and when to renew maintenance contracts and identifying and controlling asset information.

The last blog in our series on maintenance and support contracts discussed getting timely expiration notifications and determining the support level and support service needs. This next blog will touch on tips five and six – making informed decisions and deploying similar support levels.

In order to make appropriate budget and managerial decisions, employers need access to the necessary information in a timely fashion. Only when this information is both available and accurate, can business organizations make informed decisions regarding their IT infrastructures.

Companies that lack standards for sharing information between individuals often encounter difficulties when other departments attempt to determine the cost outlay of IT assets. Every business should have ready access to the support entitlement details—at both the contract and equipment level — associated with each application environment.

Companies should deploy similar support levels across the supporting IT equipment for applications, projects, or application tiers. Make sure assets from different manufacturers for a given application environment or project are similar.

Coming up next with tips seven and eight: budget and forecast support costs and tracking the relationship between hardware and software support licenses.

For a review of the first two posts in this 5 part series click the links below:

Maintenance and Support Best Practice 1 & 2
Maintenance and Support Best Practice 3 & 4

Our last blog posting discussed the first two best practices. Centralizing and consolidating manufacturer’s contracts and identifying the total cost of ownership or TCO. This latest blog will discuss the next two tips: getting timely expiration notifications and determining the support level and support service needs.

Proper handling of application environments includes proactive management of the underlying hardware and software infrastructure. When support contracts expire, companies face business disruptions to their critical application services. Therefore, companies should receive timely notification of any pending vendor support and maintenance contract expirations. Make sure you can view each support contract associated with each business application environment, including support contract and line item (individual equipment) expiration dates.

Like any financial asset, you must manage the complete lifecycle—acquisition, configuration, deployment, maintenance, and support. Determine the importance of each application environment to your business, and then determine the support level and its associated support service for your equipment. The reason is simple: When you have your support services in place—at an appropriate level of service—you’re significantly more prepared for potential business disruptions.

For example, this practice is essential in disaster recovery planning. When establishing the recovery time objective, ask, “Are the support contracts in place? What equipment do we have covered by support contracts, and what does that support entail? Have the necessary vendors reviewed the disaster recovery plan, and have we included all the vendors in the escalation processes?” Determine the support level and entitled support service with each application environment, and you can easily answer these questions.

Next up: make informed decisions and deploy similar support levels. If you have some best practices you’d like to share, leave a comment.

For more information about our maintenance and support contract service, Smartrack, visit http://www.virtual.com/x.php?p=Support.

This quandary reduces the availability of business applications, endangers current operations efficiency, and impairs companies’ ability to take advantage of new, cost-saving technologies that can reduce capital and operation expenses. For all these reasons, companies require the ability to dynamically map and model their business applications to their underlying infrastructures—including support.

Business applications require ongoing maintenance and support for their underlying infrastructure, which makes managing support contracts a crucial part of the overall IT and business management. Support and maintenance contract information must be readily available for planning and budgeting purposes— and especially in cases of emergencies. This helps reduce business risks associated with application support, capacity provisioning, and any other ongoing infrastructure issues.

This next blog series will focus on ten best practices proven to promote cost-effective capital and operational cost controls—so you can reduce ongoing IT costs and increase business application availability.

To stay informed, corporate decision-makers need to see all relevant maintenance and support information. That’s why you should centralize and consolidate all manufacturers’ contracts in a repository, viewable from a single dashboard. This dashboard allows organizations to search, sort, and group asset information according to their business needs. Additionally, you can usually export centralized, online support contract information into other data formats such as Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF, and XML—simplifying collaboration with peers, management teams, and other business analytics applications.

Efficient data center management demands the ability to account for assets and optimize them for the future. To accomplish this, IT departments must identify the total cost of ownership (TCO) for their IT environment, based on asset inventory information. With this information, you can accurately determine how much your organization currently spends on its application services and how much these services will cost in the future. These calculations help your company plan budgets, implement budget controls, and curtail expenses.

Our next blog posting will focus on two more tips: Getting timely expiration notifications and determining the support level and support service needed. We’d love to hear your opinions too, so please chime in!

For more information about our maintenance and support contract service, Smartrack, visit http://www.virtual.com/x.php?p=Support.