New ASIRT guidelines for 2015-16

ASIRT held its annual "fair business" meeting with leading members from SI and Retail community and ASIRT Gold Members to review and recommend best practices for IT infrastructure support industry. After a good 4 hour debate and discussion, ASIRT Guidelines for Gold Member Program, Service Levels and Optimal Support Infrastructure and Pricing were worked out for recommendation to entire industry.

IT services & AMC business has become a commodity business. Partners fight on price to retain customers leading to cut-throat competition and unsustainable prices. ASIRT has been working to get price sanctity in the industry today so that customers can be best benefited by delivering service that matters to support their business growth.

Promising unlimited support for systems and products under maintenance and charging a small fee being the norm, it is impossible to continue providing good services and make investment in service infrastructure. For two decades the norm has been that for a small fee per device per year, unlimited visits and support is provided. In absence of correct estimate for provisioning resources, IT service companies are unable to provide quality services or have been bleeding having a big impact upon their working and growth.

This year ASIRT recommends Fair Usage Policy for all IT infrastructure such as PC, servers, firewalls, etc. for the prices quoted with additional service incidences to be charged for in the event of on site support to battle rising cost of additional manpower utilization.

ASIRT urges members and industry stake holders to start this practice now and make it an industry norm. This would not only be a growth measure for SI but also for industry that is being serviced. ASIRT urges industry to explain to customers that IT service needs costlier resources and it is not possible to charge a small fee and offer countless incidents.

"Work on this business model. Soon we see it percolating down to PCs and notebooks as well in coming years," says ASIRT chairman Chetan Shah.