Resellers say customers losing a fortune from downtime

Most resellers, MSPs and systems integrators (54 percent) estimate their customers could be losing anything from £10,000 up to £1 million from just a single hour of downtime, according to research. And worryingly, 40 percent are seeing over four hours of downtime when hardware goes down.

The research was carried out by Agilitas, the provider of inventory-as-a-service solutions. Shaun Lynn, CEO of Agilitas, said: “Having IT hardware spares available has for many years been essential to business continuity and maximum uptime.

“However, as organisations become more dependent on technology, service level agreements (SLAs) are being shortened and expectations raised. Two hour part to site SLAs 24x7x365 are becoming the norm.”

The research also revealed that 40 percent of providers find meeting SLAs the greatest challenge to providing inventory support to customers, and 25 percent said sourcing parts was a problem. Another 20 percent are struggling to get parts to customers on time in order to meet critical SLAs.

“Meeting SLAs and reducing downtime through flexible support should be the key aim for service providers,” said Lynn. “Inventory-as-a-service’s ability to distribute parts quickly from multiple locations means that providers won’t need to worry about getting a part from A-to-B again, coupled with direct access to technical and remote support 24×7.”

Agilitas also surveyed service providers running their own in-house operations, and found a quarter currently run complete in-house inventory operations despite the rising cost of office and warehouse space. Over a fifth aren’t sure how much storing parts costs each year, and one in seven say the high costs of managing inventory is preventing investment in other areas of their business.

Lynn said: “The increasingly high capital cost of managing hardware often makes it unsustainable for many IT providers. Customers want an always-on service with two hour SLAs met 24×7. Organisations moving towards inventory-as-a-service are reducing capex as the service keeps costs stable, ensuring inventory management is an operational expenditure not a capital one.”

Agilitas can manage spare parts inventories across server, storage and networking technologies over the cloud and can deliver complementary technical and training services.

@AntonySavvas