Maintenance Contracts: Easy Money for VARs?
In this economy, SMBs are holding tight to old equipment. But there’s a potential silver lining for VARs: Cashing in on maintenance contracts. But how can you track scores of contracts across your customer base? That’s where Managed Maintenance, Inc. (MMI) — maker of the OneView SaaS portal — hopes to help. Here’s the scoop.
MMI, a two-year-old company based out of Boca Raton, Fla., offers OneView to any company trying to juggle contracts. A dashboard interface lists the number of contracts, and other relevant data, as well as a variety of other widgets like RSS feed readers, all customizable. Clicking into a contract shows details like the next scheduled service visit, when the contract is up, etc. Users can even set reminders, a handy feature when scheduling maintenance years in advance. OneView can also store a copy of the contract itself for each bit of hardware registered. They also include a customer service module to get in touch with IT staff or even MMI itself.
One sticking point is getting all the information into the portal. MMI says that OneView supports manual entry via spreadsheet, and also has API hooks for other software to extract the appropriate data.
Another potential consideration is that it’s all hosted off-site by Rackspace. Many customers and VARs will welcome that simple SaaS approach. But some may balk about having private contract and warranty information up in a cloud.
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If VAR’s work with a Master ISMO such as ServiceKey, there would be no need to juggle contracts. A Master ISMO will ping VAR’s 30 days out of a contract renewal date for it’s customers and will work on behalf of the VAR, branded contracts so the relationship is always held by the reseller.
For those VARS who may not be comfortable having their private contract and warranty information in the cloud MMI offers a licensable product to be implemented in their own data centers.
The OneView application will also ping VAR’s 30 days out regarding not only contract renewals, warranty end dates and with a variety of other custom reports.
Christine: The VAR Guy thanks you for insights on ServiceKey. Please be on the lookout for an email from Matt Weinberger. He’ll be in touch seeking more info.
Tina: Thanks for clarifying MMI offering both in-cloud and on-premise options. Keep The VAR Guy and his team posted as MMI makes additional channel-centric moves.
-TVG