– Ken Barhoover, Interactive Marketing Manager at Park Place Technologies (www.parkplacetechnologies.com), says:
Third party hardware support and third party maintenance (TPM) enable four types of business value – cost reduction, cost avoidance, business agility, and risk reduction. We’ll cover all of these over time on our blog, but this blog post will discuss cost reduction.
TPM services enable organizations to reduce their direct (budgeted) costs for IT labor and outsourced maintenance services. Here are 3 ways this happens:
Lower third-party maintenance costs. The benefit of TPM services most often cited by IT managers is a lower maintenance service price, which can range from 30 percent to 60 percent less than OEM pricing. This can be a significant savings given the cost of OEM pricing and the yearly increases that are typically incurred.
Internal IT labor costs. Organizations can reduce their internal IT labor costs by outsourcing storage, inventory, installation, and testing tasks related to replacement hardware and spare parts. This can give an organization tight on budget savings from salary and employee overhead expenses which rise every year or can eliminate the need to hire additional personnel during periods of growth.
Consolidation of multiple support vendors. Historically, OEMs have preferred to take on mixed support contracts only when their own equipment is the largest element of the overall IT infrastructure. Add to this the propensity of modern data centers to utilize hardware from multiple vendors and the result is that IT organizations are likely to carry multiple OEM agreements, each of which incurs overhead. A single TPM provider can reduce this extra overhead by consolidating data center hardware and services under one contract.
**ParkPlaceTechnologies is a regular contributor on Data Center POST
