New IT support company - billing unfairly?

Curio · 19 Jun 2013 at 17:04

Here's the back-story...

I started here about 1 year ago and the server setup was a confusing mess, and the current IT support company was a bit of a shower. We shopped around for another company. Decided on one. They came in and did an audit of the server setup (which was quite expensive) and then quoted us for the work and equipment that would be needed to optimize our configuration and address the various issues we were having. It all looked good, so we went with them.

Now, of course there are going to be some teething issues after a pretty significant server reconfiguration - that was to be expected. However, lots of issues are cropping up that they are billing us for - issues that I feel should have been caught in the audit and therefor included in the quote and initial work. I'm talking DNS replication problems, DHCP issues, AD problems, GP problems, and other stuff that is beyond my level of understanding. Shouldn't these problems have been caught in the audit and/or addressed during the initial reconfig work? It seems pretty unfair to me.

We've already questioned some of this stuff and they have credited us back on a few things, but it just keeps coming. It's been 3 months since they came in, and finally in the past couple of weeks things seem to have stabilized and we've had no issues at all. We've still got a pile of questionable bills though....which of course they're chasing and charging interest on.

Is this pretty typical of how things work? Or did we manage to choose an even worse shower than the previous lot?

Moeks · 19 Jun 2013 at 19:03

Some of those problems would only really become apparent after the reconfiguration and the new network started to run, it really depends on just how significant the overhaul they did was, chances are something somwhere was holding onto old routes that nolonger apply or have changed, something wasn't named correctly, something pointing at the wrong thing etc. There is a huge plethora of issues that are likely to crop up with a big reconfiguration that are going to be missed and only become apparent later. Although they will typically be little configuration issues ...they can take ages to find, especially as the new company did not set your system up from scratch so they didn't have any of the designers on hand to ask about the particulars, they would know only what they could see, and their are many hidden things which can throw a spanner into the works, especially if you have Linux systems involved in the network and more so if you have different generations and brands of hardware spread over multiple sites.

But in all likelihood they probably are trying to charge you too much for making simple after the fact changes, does your contract say anything about any particular time frame they need to have serious network breaking issues solved within? ...it really depends on how complete their support of your setup is though. I am guessing not that complete at all if you pay for every little thing they do rather than just a fee to take care of the system for x amount of time.

tribz · 19 Jun 2013 at 19:24

Just one server? How many users to give us an idea of the scale of things.

Moeks · 19 Jun 2013 at 19:48

...it's got to be more than 1 server for so many issues to have come up like that ...I would assume.

Curio · 19 Jun 2013 at 21:09

Thanks guys,

It's one server box running 3 VM's. The original config was 3 boxes + VM's....using 2 old servers for this and that....it was very odd. We're a small company - about 15 workstations.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

A while after the reconfig, they said "oh, you have DHCP on this VM and it should really be on this VM - it's not "best practice" and might be causing issues". To me, that should have been noticed during the audit and certainly when the tech was setting everything up. We got billed for it.

They discovered a bunch of minor issues from when we had a power cut and the UPS failed (before the new lot came along). This wasn't picked up during the audit or the reconfig, but a tech later on found it in 2 seconds while looking into something else....think he was running some scan/report type thing. We got billed for fixing these issues.

We have an "essentials" type contract as opposed to a "fix everything" for a flat fee. However, it doesn't change the fact that some of the stuff should have been caught earlier. Right?

andicole0 · 19 Jun 2013 at 21:18

What were the other bidders like for the contract? Did their responses to your request for quote say anything different.

Andi.

LizardKing · 19 Jun 2013 at 22:16

If your thinking of changing company feel free to give me an email, this is the sort of thing i do on a daily basis.
Though i notice your in the USA so may not be the most practical

brendy · 19 Jun 2013 at 22:24

Bit late now but rather than pay call outs, I would have negotiated a maintenance agreement with SLA's relative to the importance of the servers roles.

Rroff · 19 Jun 2013 at 22:30

TBH I'd worry most about the quality of their work, if they are getting everything running smoothly, finding and fixing things that really are issues then unless they are completely taking the mick its probably not worth quibbling too much on the price (good IT support is worth paying a bit for) - some things probably should have been found in the initial audit but other stuff sounds like stuff that you can't always discover until you start digging deep into the mess even tho they are fairly simple issues in their own right.

DRZ · 20 Jun 2013 at 09:53

I'd want to see the scope of your engagement and a statement of work for what you paid for before commenting really.

Needless to say that if its outside of the scope of work agreed upon after the audit but before you engaged them to complete the changes then you haven't got much of a leg to stand on. Issues caused by them are completely different to issues identified by them after the fact though...

No audit is going to uncover everything, there is just too much going on and too many unknown unknowns.

Have you actually sat down with them face to face and gone through everything and asked them to identify anything that could have been caused by their work vs things identified afterwards that they have made recommendations on? Would you have accepted their recommendations and paid for the work if it had been identified up front?

skyripper · 20 Jun 2013 at 10:01

Why is this service provider not saying "We have found this issue, this is the impact on your business, we can fix it, it will take this amount of time, and therefore cost you this much", rather than going "We found this, we decided to fix it, pay up" ?

El Pew · 24 Jun 2013 at 16:25

DRZ said:
I'd want to see the scope of your engagement and a statement of work for what you paid for before commenting really.

This. I live by SoWs, if it's not listed as a line item I don't do it. If your SoW is sufficiently vague that the things you're talking about aren't explicitly covered then you might expect them to charge extra, although if you have the right powers of persuasion you might be able to make the vagueness work in your favour.

Just bear in mind that they would presumably like to do more business with you, so if you push back harder you might get more concessions in the hopes that they can keep you as a customer (as you're already discovering to an extent). You might also want to consider switching to an all-in managed service contract where you can annoy them for anything you want for a fixed yearly price. It might be more expensive initially but if they're gradually bleeding you dry anyway then it might make more sense.

Showboat · 25 Jun 2013 at 13:03

skyripper said:
Why is this service provider not saying "We have found this issue, this is the impact on your business, we can fix it, it will take this amount of time, and therefore cost you this much", rather than going "We found this, we decided to fix it, pay up" ?

Pretty much this.