Power Expert Care Tweaked With Add-On, Fixed Price Services
July 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the wake of the Kyndryl spinout last year, Big Blue has been tweaking and repackaging the services it offers through what used to be called Lab Services and what is now known as Technology Expert Labs, offered through its Technology Services division.
The Power Expert Care services, which are designed to offer supplemental support for customers using IBM i, AIX, or Linux on Power Systems, there are two tiers, Advanced and Premium. (You would think there would be a Standard or Basic tier, but there isn’t. Maybe there will be some day. . . . ) This week, IBM made changes to the Premium tier.
In announcement letter AD23-0485, IBM offered some new premium elements that are available under a fixed price scheme rather than under a tiered price or custom consulting engagement price. The first is an option for enhanced response time, which gives a guaranteed response time of 30 minutes for Severity One and Severity Two issues. The second provides access to a Technical Account Manager for what IBM calls direct engagement on “high priority” support cases as well as the key go-between “in-scope” software. There is another fixed-price add-on to provide Remote Cole Load capability for system and Hardware Management Console (HMC) firmware. These add-ons are available on all Power10-based servers.
The prices for these add-ons might be fixed, but they ain’t public. So we can’t tell you what they are. Or what other Expert Care services cost, either. (There ought to be a law against not providing list prices, and there used to be a Consent Decree from 1956 and 1969 that compelled Big Blue to provide prices for its products and services.)
In announcement letter AD23-0278, IBM is taking the Global Total Microcode Support (GTMS), Media Retention, and Enterprise Accelerated Value Program (eAVP) features formerly offered in Power Expert Care at the Premium level out of the service and putting in the Enhanced Response Time, Access to Technical Account Manager, and Remote Code Load add-ons.
These new add ons and changes take effect as of July 25.
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