Lenovo unveils premier data centre support offering

Lenovo is beefing up its data centre product releases with the launch of a new customer service offering in Australia and New Zealand.

In what the PC maker is calling a global first, Premier Support for Data Centre Products is a new customer service troubleshooting and case management model for the ANZ market, tailored for its recently launched ThinkAgile and ThinkSystem products.

The ThinkSystem brand covers a range of server, storage and networking products, while ThinkAgile is focused on software-defined data centres and converged systems. The company’s new support offering, based out of Sydney, was designed for customers of these new products and is based on the premier support model Lenovo’s PC group customers can purchase.

Premium support for the data centre range will be a paid service, and each customer will have the same access and support rating. High-level support access will not be determined by what tier a partner is, with end-customers, CIOs or Lenovo’s direct clients also eligible to sign up.

Data Centre Group lead Rob Makin told CRN the service offers customers the chance to alleviate the strain on in-house support staff.

“When it comes to traditional support offerings, we find that some of our customers biggest pains points are having multiple points of contact for support and having a high percentage of in house staff spending time ‘keeping the lights on’ instead of focusing on innovating,” he said.

“We know as well it’s frustrating when support services have little knowledge of customers environments and how important the call back process is when dealing with high severity issues. Customers want technical account management that provides holistic reporting of their fleet.”

Makin added that the service would enable repeat sales through its reseller partners.

“Lenovo ANZ also has the DC_Go program available to our resellers/partners. DC_go provides technical assistance for their technical staff for pre-sales, configuration and setup questions,” he said.

The features of the data centre support offering includes: 24/7 technical call centre support, direct tech-to-tech access next business day or four-hour onsite response, single contact for end-to-end simplified case and escalation management, third-party software support and system health checks.

According to Lenovo, the premier support team will provide “a single point of ownership for customer issues, third-party collaborative software support and technical account oversight for customers wishing to get the ‘white glove’ treatment on their Lenovo Data Centre hardware and software”.