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November 2009 — Not all support services are the same. Comparing Dell and HP is like comparing apples and oranges. In 2008, Dell introduced Dell ProSupport for IT. There are important differences customers should consider when comparing Dell and HP support.
Please consider the following facts:
HP mission critical customers reduce the risks of incurring unwanted business costs associated with downtime and benefit from HP onsite expertise to improve operational efficiency. Dell claims that their customers reduce downtime by up to 22 percent on average.2 However reducing the downtime caused by an outage is not the same as preventing outages from occurring in the first place.
HP offers 6-hour, 8-hour and 24-hour call-to-repair time commitments as globally-consistent service levels. HP uses “commercially reasonable efforts” to repair hardware within the specified time frame for any customer who purchases this support—regardless of problem severity. Dell’s similar reactive service is limited to customers who purchase the mission critical option and declare a “Severity 1” problem. The Dell ProSupport for IT contract states that a problem is “usually” fixed within six hours and that a Dell technician “usually” arrives onsite within two, four, or eight hours.3
HP customers can count on HP to work on a problem until it is resolved, while a Dell customer, with a relatively complex problem, is dependent upon Dell’s judgment to continue working beyond the 1 ½ hour time limit.
HP puts itself on the clock earlier, so that we can resolve the problem more quickly.
For no extra cost, HP includes monitoring that can advise warranty and support customers of potential issues in their environment so that corrective actions can be taken before problems occur. This takes some of the maintenance burden off of the customer’s IT staff. Dell provides this benefit only to customers who pay a separate fee.
HP can provide full support from the call center all the way to its back-end development teams for more of the platforms that deliver IT service to end users. HP supports the complete environment, including servers running Unix, Microsoft® Windows® or Linux, storage, networking and blades. Dell does not provide support for Unix environments, specifies that ProSupport for IT is available for standard configurations of Dell EMC Storage Systems
7, and does not provide mission critical support for its Energy Smart PowerEdge servers.
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For IT customers who want to turn to a single vendor for support, reduce complexity and proactively address all causes of IT downtime, HP offers a more comprehensive support solution than Dell.
Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
Unix is a registered trademark of the Open Group.
