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SimpliVity rolls out new support tiers and offerings
Tue, 1st Mar 2016
FYI, this story is more than a year old

SimpliVity has released four new support tiers and added new offerings for mission-critical enterprise applications.

The new support plans expand customer choice and flexibility, ensuring the right level of coverage is available to meet the needs of each particular environment. The new plans also delivers OmniWatch, SimpliVity's new proactive support service, as well as premium access and advocacy options.

“Since our very first product announcement in 2013, we have been 100% committed to our customers' success, providing simple, one-call support with highly competent and trained engineers.

“We now support more than 4,000 units globally, 24x7, in 12 languages. In addition, our staggeringly high customer satisfaction rating - 9.5 out of ten - confirms that customers are recognising our value,” says Randy Boutin, SimpliVity vice president of support, services and manufacturing.

“With our expanded offerings, we're able to deliver new levels of choice, business productivity, and hyperconvergence return on investment, especially for the enterprise,” Boutin says.

SimpliVity's four new enterprise plan options are: Mission Critical, Business Critical, Production, and Basic. All levels provide the same essential elements, including technical support, software updates, online resources, and OmniWatch, but the service level agreements (SLAs) and enhanced capabilities are attuned to each tier, allowing customers to align support with the needs of their environment.

Standard for all support plans, OmniWatch is a new service that continuously monitors and evaluates the health of a customer's hyperconverged infrastructure. With active tracking throughout the IT environment, OmniWatch will identify problems before they impact the business by filing a support case and alerting a SimpliVity support expert of potential issues or risks.

SimpliVity's enhanced services provide top levels of support to enterprise customers and small and medium-sized businesses that run their entire IT infrastructure on SimpliVity's hyperconverged infrastructure.

New enterprise support capabilities include:

  • Priority access: 24x7x365 priority access places customers at the top of the queue, minimising downtime
  • Annual health check: Mission-critical infrastructure is optimised with annual IT system checks that offer recommendations and best practices to improve performance and availability
  • Root cause analysis: After resolving an issue, support delivers a report that analyses the problem's symptom, cause, and corrective actions, and then recommends tactics for improvement and prevention
  • Premium SLAs: Up to 1, 2, or 4-hour response times, and four hour onsite hardware support allows customers to meet mission-critical SLAs and maximises application availability
  • Global support coverage

The company is also introducing add-on service options for premium, personalised support:

  • Designated Support Engineers: Enterprise subscribers are provided a senior support engineer to serve as a single point of contact for all questions and support issues. Assigned from day one, designated support engineers are well versed in the customer's business, IT environment, and support history, accelerating troubleshooting and resolution.
  • Technical Account Managers: Serving as an advocate for advancing an enterprise's IT infrastructure, a seasoned technical strategist assists with system planning, design, and workload migration; offers training and best practice advice; and performs regular system upgrades and maintenance. They also conduct proactive system audits and health checks to ensure systems are operating at peak performance.

“In IT, we all know that data center support is essential, whether it's a natural disaster or spilled coffee, things happen that can disrupt an IT infrastructure. World-class support is really what separates a promising invention from technology leaders,” says Michael Moskaluk, Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) director of IT and services.

“Companies like SimpliVity stand out. They're not only technologically advanced, but they've built an impressive support program with knowledgeable, friendly support experts, worldwide coverage, 24x7 availability, and proactive monitoring.

“With 87,000 members looking to AUPE for support, SimpliVity's services gives me the peace of mind that my infrastructure will always be available and running," he says.