Cost-Effective Maintenance for Aging IT Equipment: How Interactive Keeps Systems Running Smoothly

For their owners, these aging devices pose an interesting dilemma – there is no good economic or technical reason to replace them, but often they have outlasted their warranty periods, and their manufacturers are no longer willing to maintain them.

For more than 35 years, the end-to-end IT service provider Interactive has been delivering the maintenance needs of aging equipment for a customer base that today numbers around 3500.

According to Interactive's managing director for systems, Simon Durkin, his company is willing and able to maintain equipment at peak performance long after its manufacturer has stepped back from the task.

"We've got enterprise customers across every industry and every vertical," Durkin says. "I've been in this business for a long time, and the age of some of the equipment that we continue to support for customers is quite mind boggling."

A commitment to quality

One of the key reasons why Interactive has become the provider of choice for so many organisations is that it offers service level agreements (SLAs) that exceed those seen elsewhere, including a guaranteed connection to a service engineer of less than 10 minutes.

Once the problem is assessed, customers will then come into contact with a second key reason why so many organisations now use Interactive – the quality of its service engineers.

"We're investing in the training and the capability of our field engineers and providing them with the ability to progress their career through our Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 certifications, and allowing them to be cross skilled in different technologies," Durkin says.

This training also translates into a customer service ethos that ensures that even when the support engineers cannot quickly determine if a fault lies in hardware or software, they will continue working until that question is resolved.

"Our field engineers take full responsibility for the resolution of the service call," Durkin says. "And on average we can achieve a 'first time' fix of 96 per cent, compared to the industry average of around 86 per cent."

Another key attraction is Interactive's commitment to holding spare parts within Australia for all of the equipment that it agrees to service.

"Many of the manufacturers, regardless of the age of the equipment, leverage warehouses that could be in Singapore or even further away, depending on their assessment of failure rates," Durkin says. "Our parts philosophy has always been that 100 per cent of spare parts are stocked locally within each state for every device that we support."

A cost-effective alternative

And because hardware maintenance is a core offering for Interactive, Durkin says his company is able to offer service rates that are competitive with or better than those of the original manufacturers.

Hence many clients have chosen to aggregate their maintenance service needs across multiple manufacturers with a single supplier, and some clients utilise Interactive to maintain some of their newer equipment, to ease their overall supplier requirements without impacting their warranty rights.

"There are protections within the Australian consumer law that allows equipment to be supported by non-manufacturers," Durkin says. "So they are protected."

Importantly, Interactive also offers customers the option to roll over their maintenance contracts monthly, rather than the yearly option usually offered by manufacturers. This affords customers significant flexibility when planning for the retirement of that equipment through a future upgrade or cloud migration.

"We've got many examples of customers who are moving to the cloud and only need six months of support," Durkin says. "Sometimes they are still with us two years later. The aspirational goal of many organisations is to move to the cloud, but it can be difficult to execute, so we provide them with a safety net."

Flexibility for the long term

This combination of capabilities has enabled Interactive to assist clients where the alternative options were simply unacceptable.

And because Interactive operates its own data centres, it can also take on equipment that it is maintaining should their client's no longer wish to keep them on premises, such as when they are shutting their own data centres down.

"We've had some customers that have asked us to support equipment over long periods of time and the main reason that they don't want to replace that equipment is they can't get the funding to replace it," Durkin says. "We're talking about large midrange type systems where you've got to replace the operating system and the applications - significant projects."