FAQs regarding 3rd Party Maintenance
General
Questions
Axentel provides support for network, server, storage, tape from all major brands such as Cisco, Juniper, 3Com, Avaya, IBM, SUN, HP, HDS, STK, NetApp, EMC etc. Axentel specializes in out of warranty & EOL hardware maintenance with OEM-comparable service level yet adding additional customer focus and significant cost reduction.
Axentel serves some of the largest brands in nearly every industry vertical. We serve over 50 of largest telecom operators, 20 of the largest ICT companies in the world as well as many of the largest manufacturing, healthcare, logistics and education organizations across Asia. Our maintenance renewal rate is over 95% with 99% SLA success rate on average in our history.
Although Axentel is a Singapore based company we however support customers in over 30 countries We cover within a 30-mile radius of listed zip codes, as well as some of our international contact numbers. One of the major advantage Axentel provides is the convenience as a single point of contact in supporting multi-vendor & multi location contacts. Our ability to provide one stop support can dramatically lower not only cost but the complexity for our customers in managing their infrastructure equipment across platform and the globe.
A vendor maintenance plan is consisted of 3 parts: hardware replacement, Helpdesk & software update. For 3rd party maintenance, we provide hardware replacement and helpdesk exactly same as OEMs however with 50-70% cost reduction. We cannot provide software update however most of the EOL products we support no longer have updated software and if they do , we would advise the customers to purchase vendor support on those specific equipment that require software update. However, as a whole, the customer can expect at least 30% & up to 70% cost reduction without sacrificing on quality.
According to a report by Forrester, the useful life of IT equipment should be over 10 years and 80% of the CIOs upgrade not because of the new features but guided by the industry refresh cycle which is 3-5 years. Axentel is not against refresh but we align our interest with our customers rather than vendors and we want our customers to maximize their capital investment rather than wasted because of forced upgrade!
Our idea is simple . Keep what’s working and upgrade only when there’s new feature which is useful not because of vendor’s decision. Also, use a 3rd party to compare your support option so you can have more choices.
Although labor cost will steadily increase, components prices normally drop and there are lot of components available in the secondary market therefore Axentel would be able to provide affordable price in support of EOL products and promise not to increase price even though they have been declared obsolete by OEMs. We also do not need to push our customers to buy new equipment so we’re happy to support our customers for as long as they need our support.
Axentel has provided AxenCare to various departments for Singapore Government or joint ventures including SMRT, SBS Transit, NUS etc.
You should consider Axentel if your current maintenance provider :
- Doesn’t want to support you on your EOL products
- High cost in support of both current & EOL equipment
- Fail SLAs few times
- Not really specialized in maintenance
- Cannot support you in overseas location
Fortunately for enterprises – that’s not the case. Imagine your car, say if you have a problem with the tire, is your only choice to change the tire with OEMs which cost extremely high? Most people would compare prices from few dealers(OEM and 3rd party) to see which one can provide the best price to repair the car and as all of us know, quality is same. Vendors in IT industry do not want to open up the support market in fear of losing revenue therefore they will claim you cannot get reliable support from a 3rd party – which is false.
Warranty is not the same as Maintenance. Warranty is best effort when it comes to replacement therefore it doesn’t guarantee a service level agreement (or guaranteed replacement time). If your equipment are critical, you should purchase maintenance to ensure the hardware replacement can take place within the SLA specified.
Axentel offers managed IT service package to add additional value e CIO or IT Director who is tasked with more than just hardware and operating system support. The services range from install, move, add and change services (IMAC), to onsite support engineers (ASE), to data center merges, moves, transition and conversion services – as well as disk retention and destruction support. TERiX delivers a world of experience with these programs – at all levels – from management tasks in PMO through execution of deliverables inside of the work action plans.
Yes. We specialize in Unix support across all platform.