Buying Direct From a Manufacturer Can Cost You.

Software and Hardware VAR’s (Value Added Resellers) Are Key To Success

Everyone wants to save a buck. When it comes to buying new software or hardware for your company, you can certainly find cheaper alternatives to purchasing from a value added reseller, a.k.a. VAR, like Optiform.

When investing thousands of dollars into something that will affect your internal organization and extend to your customers, it is important that you take all elements into consideration when making the decision to buy.

Systems Integrations

When you buy direct from a manufacturer, they usually don’t have experience with integrations into other software, utilities or tools that experienced resellers have access to and permission to sell.

Examples of this include integrations with your CRM, homegrown support ticket management system, and accounts payable software just to name a few. The addition of a new product to your organization needs to fit within what you are already doing. If it doesn’t, you are just adding more work to your team rather than streamlining processes.

Professional Services

Professional services from a manufacturer are often farmed out to other resellers or if kept internal, they are focused only the products they sell and don’t tend to think outside of the manufacturer’s box. The manufacturer knows their product and knows it well, but the experiences the resellers gain from working with a plethora of clients are very beneficial to you because  they can share lessons learned and account for the unexpected.

Ongoing Support

Ongoing support from a manufacturer may stop when you quit paying annual fees but often a reseller can help you by the hour regardless of annual support contract status with the manufacturer. We have seen this happen too often – customer buys software which mandates annual support be purchased for year one. When the annual contract ends and the customer doesn’t upgrade, they are no longer eligible to receive service from the manufacturer.

A reseller is available to support your product regardless of the status of your support contract with the manufacturer. The key here though, is that if the issue being faced is as a result of a version upgrade needing to happen and you aren’t current on your support contract, the reseller will be limited to fixes within the current version available to the customer. Learn more about why it is important to keep your annual upgrade assurance current in this post.

Version Upgrades

Resellers can often help you migrate onto new software and are willing to help you migrate to new systems when the time comes. They usually spend resources learning new products and finding new innovative solutions that may not include the current manufactures products.

Software is constantly evolving and having access to the latest versions can be extremely beneficial to your organization. One of the greatest values of working with a reseller is for operating system upgrades like Windows 10 upgrades and ensuring that your software and hardware will function as expected after the upgrade. Upgrades from locally installed software to cloud versions are also happening frequently now. This example is not a small feat. Resellers are extremely valuable in this regard.

There are many benefits to working with a reseller, and these are just some of the top ones that we wanted to share with you today.

If you have a support question, reach out to our Support team! They have been doing this type of work for over 20 years. Their customer experience ranges from small businesses and startups to large enterprise clients and government ones.

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