In my first article, I discussed why enterprises are adopting alternative maintenance, also known as “third-party maintenance”, at a rapid pace. I outlined three major reasons:
- Cloud Adoption
- Budget Decreases
- Customer Awareness
Today, I want to talk about cloud adoption and modernization in general, and how alternative maintenance is a catalyst for both.
For a long time, enterprises were primarily confined to buying physical servers, storage, and networking equipment, as well as standing them up between four walls. Some owned those walls, others paid for co-locations, and some did both. There was certainly innovation in the traditional data center – virtualization, HCI, SD-wan, etc., which was game changing for CIOs and CTOs.
However, nothing changed the data center like public cloud – AWS led the charge among Azure and GCP. Most executives love the idea of ditching the long-term costs of physical data centers and eliminating the “need” to buy new servers, storage, and networking equipment every 3-5 years to keep up with what the original equipment manufacturers (OEM) say they need.
One of the most costly problems executives face is moving applications off physical hardware they currently own and into a CSP. They might have a migration plan that is 12 months long but is also facing a looming maintenance renewal with Dell halfway through their migration. OEMs like Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp, and their counterparts aren’t incentivized to sell cost-effective maintenance solutions; they are incentivized to sell hardware. An executive doesn’t want to leave hardware unsupported, especially in the middle of a migration. An OEM doesn’t want to provide a superb cost-effective maintenance contract knowing they won’t sell any more hardware to the account.
There is a clear conflict of interest.
This conflict of interest does not exist with alternative maintenance. Companies like ReluTech are only incentivized to sell maintenance. Cloud adoption drives enterprises to take a harder look at how our maintenance can be a catalyst for their cloud projects and modernization.
