What are the benefits to a Maintenance Agreement?
Total Immersion Support Maintenance Agreements are designed to ensure that your systems will continue to perform their functions at a near flawless level. We achieve this through providing such services as wellness checkups, patch maintenance, version upgrades, diagnostic support and reactive support.
What is covered in a Maintenance Agreement?
As for the specific devices, that depends on what you currently have and choose to cover. To view the devices that are able to covered, please use the
Online Pricing Tool to generate a contract.
We have priced our Maintenance Agreements in such a way that they are substantially discounted for those organizations that have an adequate number of properly trained full-time systems support professionals on staff. This changes our role from that of an outsourced IT provider to that of an upper level on your escalation matrix. With over 13 years of experience supporting these platforms and exceptional access to resources both internally and through our vendors, we can ensure that your staff will never come up short. Some organizations also choose to selectively outsource a limited number of the components of their network that fall outside of their MIS's core competencies. Other companies prefer to maintain a backup for their MIS to provide additional support, or if he or she wishes to take a vacation.
What services are provided under a Maintenance Agreement?
Our maintenance agreements are designed to maintain the system in a proper functioning state. This includes a great deal of proactive maintenance including regular systems wellness checkups, patch maintenance and even version upgrades. This is of course in addition to any appropriate reactive support if the need should arise. We also will regularly provide additional services that are not listed in the contract such as the occasional support of non-covered items, MIS training and assistance with the future direction of the client's systems. Nearly all of our clients have had some level of support from most if not all of our other divisions in an effort to provide the most complete support practicable. It is our mission to ensure that our clients continue to view having a Maintenance Agreement through us as an excellent and cost-effective choice for their company.
How would the different payment options affect me?
There are two major differences in the payment options. The first is that the Agreements are priced based on a quarterly payment structure. In order to satisfy the differing cash management needs of our clients, we also provide options to pay annually or monthly. The annual payment option provides a 10% discount over our base prices, where a monthly payment option costs an additional 10%. The other primary difference is that we do not perform version upgrades of systems within the first six months of a contract unless it is on an annual payment plan. As an annual contract is only cancelable after the first six months, we have a broader scope of services that we are able provide while still ensuring profitability in the Agreement. It is worth noting, however, that by the end of twelve months, both types of contracts will have provided an identical level of services.
What can I expect from a quality of service?
All Total Immersion strive to provide the highest quality of service possible. Our Atlanta call center is staffed with individuals who all have at least four years of systems support experience, and are able to provide the quickest path to resolving your issues. The vast majority of inbound calls are handled on the spot and those that are made at a particularly busy time are almost always responded to within 10 minutes. If you are local to Atlanta, and we are not able to solve the problem over the phone, we will immediately dispatch one of our consultants out to your site to get the situation remedied. It is important to remember that we view these Agreements as a cancelable annuity and are extremely motivated to ensure that you continue to place your business with us.
What is the TIS RemoteKit?
The TIS RemoteKit is a collection of hardware that is designed to allow us to have complete control of the systems that are attached to it. This can include all of the devices that are attached to a single existing KVM switch in addition to a router or switch. It also provides a dialup method of access in the event of an Internet router or Firewall failure. The system is the property of the client and is thereby able to be used by the company's IT staff once they have signed a waiver stating that there could be an increase in response times if the device becomes improperly configured or inoperable.
If I have similar equipment to the RemoteKit, do I have to buy it anyway?
If you already have a TCP/IP KVM device that also allows for dial-in access in addition to having an approved method for remotely administering your routers, you can request a waiver that will allow you to forgo that cost. Although we try to be extremely flexible about this issue, we must balance that desire with the need to guarantee the time it takes us to repair any problems that may come up.
What steps do you take to ensure that my systems are handled safely?
As a services company, the most important step we can take to ensuring that your systems are always treated with the highest level respect and professionalism is to only employ individuals of exceptional integrity. We have always understood that a service company can never grow beyond its reputation, and we guard the integrity of ours vigilantly. In addition, we generate a login and password that is unique to your system and will request that full auditing is turned on your system. We will never ask you for the administrator passwords or any other passwords in your organization. As an added precaution, also we monitor and record all of the remote service that we perform on your systems in an effort to both ensure the quality of service and to verify the extent of the work that was provided.
Can I cancel the agreement?
All Total Immersion Support Maintenance Agreements provide an easy method of canceling without undue penalty if that is what is desired. The cancellation and early termination clause can be viewed by
downloading a contract here. We believe that all of our relationships are predicated on our provided a high quality of service, and if you feel that we do not live up to the agreement we do not believe that you should be bound to a service that you obviously feel you did not adequately receive.
On a regular basis, we examine the amount of work that we provide to our clients and generate a set of actuarial tables that illustrate what the cost of servicing each type of device has been. We use those prices to generate a relatively complicated formula that takes into account many external variables such as the size of the system, the quantity of MIS's dedicated to supporting that system and the volume of devices that are covered. This then produces a rate that can best be identified by using the
Online Pricing Tool. It is worth noting that every year we have been able to provide more service per hour, and over the last ten years have never had a rate increase, and in fact have had our rates drop by nearly 50%