Ron Stephan <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >We are considering placing some of our maintenance contracts with a third >party, namely Sherlock Support Group. We are a long time user and supporter >of HP maintenance, but we must find ways to cut costs and this is a good >candidate. We have HP1000s, HP3000 and HP9000s on a LAN. The >manufacturing divisions run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so maintenance >support is vital issue. What are your experiences with third party vendors? >If any of you deal with Sherlock, how do you rate them? Any input would be >appreciated. Are you talking about hardware support? Software support? Both? Assuming that it's hardware support only: I'm uncomfortable going to a third party for hardware support on (1) newer systems and (2) older systems that are mission critical production systems. But I've got no problem with using a third party for peripherals. Let me give you some examples of things I've done to reduce maintenance costs. - I've changed my hardware support for terminals to scheduled on-site instead of same day service; this reduced the support fees for the terminals by 1/2. - When I've been at sites with lots of terminals I've dropped all hardware support on terminals: depending on the numbers it can be a good bet that buying one or a few new terminals each year will be cheaper than keeping the terminals on maintenance. - I've reduced support levels to next-day on non-mission critical peripherals: for example, some 256x impact printers and 7980 tape drives (since I have two of them and they are rarely used. I've also gone to a third party for these peripherals. Note giving only non critical peripherals to a third party is a good way to build confidence in the third party's abilities and responsiveness. - Instead on keeping my 19 DTC 48s on hardware support I've budgeted emergency funds to acquire a DTC48, TAC card, 625 card and 803 card. - At one point in the past I had a mix of 7937FL discs and C2204A discs; I turned the 7937s into a user volume set, loaded all of my test/development accounts on that volume set, and dropped hardware support on those discs -- the amount I save was enough to buy a used 7937 every months (had I wanted or needed to ). - From time to time you can get some very good deals trading in slightly older equipment for brand new equipment; between the value of the trade and the savings in support costs you can often get payback within one year. For example, a couple of years ago C2204 discs were in hot demand in the used market; I needed to get additional disc space and wanted to go with SCSI; so I shopped around and was able to trade 12GB on C2204 discs for 14GB of SCSI discs plus 4 SCSI Device adapters. That trade cost me $8000: I would up with more disc space, four channels instead of 2, and a payback well within one year. - I went to a third party for maintenance on my 2680 laser printer: saved about $800/month (i.e.: I reduced my support cost by about 40%) Good luck! -- Evan