Maintenance and Services

I was wondering if my business partner is giving me the correct answer.  I have co-delivery support with them. We signed a 3 year contract and have 10 months left on it.  We have always had issues with them regarding support.  I've been told me I have constantly had support issues because I only have break/fix support.  If I want to ask any questions about doing an upgrade it isn't covered under my support agreement.  They would open a "task" ticket which i would be charged.  The only "option" I have is to schedule a time with their sales engineer.  Is there any truth to what they are saying?  I deal with plenty of other companys and if I have a question regarding an upgrade of their product I would upon up a ticket.  

I can only speak from personal experience, having worked both for business partners and as a customer (currently on the customer side), but I would think that if you spoke to the BP's salesperson for your acccount or the sales manager, they would get the sales engineer to discuss an upgrade, i.e. sale of more product, for no cost. 

You might want to ask the question of another BP and see if you get a different answer. The other BP may also be able to help with the service issues you mentioned. I have seen higher levels of BPs, Platinum / Diamond, get a faster response from Avaya. 

We have been able to work with our BP to get issues with PLDS for downloading software mostly resolved by their escalation within Avaya. It had to do with the timing of changes to Product IDs not being updated in PLDS. Avaya made changes to the Product IDs in the middle of our maintenance contract that caused us to lose download entitlements for a couple months..

Richard C. Browne, Jr.
Telecommunications Engineer
MAP Communications, Inc.