For many businesses with large computing environments, the structure, implementation, monitoring and day-to-day evaluation of multi-million dollar hardware and software maintenance support contracts not only receive inadequate expertise when being created, but also receive totally inadequate attention once the initial price is agreed upon and signed off on.

In most cases, after the support contracts are negotiated, whether advantageous or not, everyone sits back till the next time - even though thousands if not millions of corporate dollars are being spent each month.

Many CIOs pay more attention to their monthly $120 cable television bill than they do their monthly $214,000 server maintenance bill. And if they say that it isn't their responsibility, then they had better have someone responsible who is extremely competent in support issues working the issue for them.

To assume that the maintenance vendor has the best interest of you and your mission critical environment in mind, simply because you wheel-barrel Benjamins his way on the 30th of the month, is so much faulty logic and expectation - as well as fantasy.

Creating and negotiating a large computer maintenance support contract is one of the most critical tasks a business has. The dollar cost alone to your business can be enormous. The impact that a poorly crafted support contract can have on your application up-time and your client data delivery requirements can be catastrophic.

Here are a few initial questions for you to consider:

1. When were your larger support contracts last negotiated and by whom?


2. What changes have occurred in the computing environment since that time? This includes technology, new computing platforms, more difficult business deliverables, evolving in-house technical expertise.


3. What other vendors are now offering similar service and can be considered competition to your present maintenance vendor?


4. What issues have occurred during the present maintenance contract that have caused a crisis or were failings due to vendors not performing to service levels?


5. Do you even have specific SLAs with your maintenance provider in the first place?


6. Do you have and do you keep accurate true-up dates during the entire run of the maintenance contract?
   

The above questions and many other variables need to be considered when drawing up and during the entire run of a maintenance support contract if that contract is to be efficiently used by your corporation and merit the best return on investment possible. In most instances, this simply is not the case.  Maintenance contracts are dynamic documents. By asking the right questions, at the right time, a company can save money that could be allocated for new business growth and development.