Text Box: Page 5 ň Return to Page 1 Text Box: STC LINES—July 2005 Text Box: Text Box: Reporting Capabilities Vary Reports and the ability to download data for the creation of your own reports need to be examined carefully. Some respondents did not enable customers to access all reports via a web site, one provided ticket information and forced customers to develop their own reports, and some did not have direct customer access to traffic reports. The value of these capabilities will vary from customer to customer but, if they are important, they should be clearly noted in your comparison. A robust set of canned reports can save considerable time and effort vs. producing reports on your own. The ability to download data can also be very helpful as it can save time otherwise spent re-entering data for customized reports. The time spent producing and managing reports should be entered into the comparison spreadsheet as a cost of doing business with those vendors who have limited reporting capabilities. If you use particular reports to manage costs and a provider does not offer that particular type of report you might want to include in your TCO an estimate of overcharges you are likely to miss without these reports. Another cost you may incur with some vendors is the development of customized reports. If your provider does not offer the ability to download the data you need, you should ask for price quotes for customized reports and include it in your TCO analysis. And always obtain copies of all reports as part of the RFP process. Evaluating Service Responsiveness Response time requirements for some respondents were part of a coverage bundle. In our RFP, we asked for 2-hour response time with 8x5 coverage at one site. Two respondents met this requirement by providing 7x24 service at this site. While we did not Text Box: Weighing IP Phone System Proposals on a TCO Scale (From Page 3)

(although generally incurred once a year) should also be included in your TCO analysis.

Differentiating Among Security Offerings

      Of all services, security offers are the most difficult to compare. Some respondents offered a package of services bundled into their maintenance contract (at no extra charge), while others offered a set of services with additional charges for each. 

      Respondent terminology was also confusing – some offered audits, some offered screenings and some offered both audits and screenings (and the elements of these offers are another set of functions that are difficult to compare). 

      Some provided these services on a monthly basis and some on a quarterly basis. Although we did not have the time to get into detailed comparisons of these offers the best advice is:

¨ Know what you need before writing the RFP. Do your homework, including asking many questions of respondents.

¨ Specify exactly what you need in the RFP – use detailed feature lists rather than terminology such as “audits.”

¨ When you receive the res-ponses ask those who did not fully comply to estimate the incremental costs of full compliance using either their professional services or those of a third party. Add those additional costs to each bid.

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compute a financial benefit or penalty from having coverage that did not conform to our request, we would certainly recommend that this be noted as a soft benefit in an overall comparison.

Remote Monitoring Effectiveness

      Comparisons of remote monitor-ing and remediation performance are important. Some respondents used automated systems to do some of the repairs and others only used remote technicians.

      In our RFP we asked (among other parameters) for the average time to repair remotely, percent alarms/troubles detected remotely and the overall percent of alarms/troubles repaired remotely. The time to repair remotely and percent repaired remotely are important because they reduce downtime. (Although we did not probe more deeply into these statistics, it is important to ask for breakouts in terms of trouble severity.)

      Since it is hard to develop a financial measure of these different levels of performance, we recommend developing a measure (e.g., 1 to 10) and comparing all respondents on the same scale.

Software Updates

      Software updates (patches, dot releases, etc.) are usually included in an IP telephony maintenance contract but some respondents included installation while others did not.  If you have technicians spending time checking for updates and installing them you might want to add this cost to the offers of those respondents.

      Software upgrades (major new releases e.g., version 3.0 to 4.0) are usually optional and most, but not all, of the respondents included installa-tion in the upgrade charge.  If you purchase this coverage you may pay your provider (or a third party) T&M charges for installation. These costs