Oakwood’s Essential Support

An attractive alternative to Microsoft’s Premier/Unified Support model.

As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, our team of consultants implement Microsoft technologies on a daily basis. When you need support, our engineers are able to quickly diagnose and address your concerns.

Microsoft Certified Technicians

Exclusively Onshore Oakwood Employees

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Understanding Microsoft’s Unified (formerly Premier) support model

It wasn’t long ago that Microsoft moved away from their legacy support model (Premier Support) to make way for a new approach in supporting their users in the form of Unified Support.

Where Premiere Support was a very specific labor rate-card model that allowed organizations to buy blocks of hours to correspond with various levels of Microsoft technical support – the new Unified Support model did away with this structure. Unified Support is a fee based model based on a percentage of the agreement cost and all of an organization’s other Microsoft spend dating back five years. To add to the confusion, Microsoft has divided spend inputs into three categories:

Server Spend

Applications & Systems Spend

Azure Spend

The spend associated with each of these categories is subtotaled and a unique percentage is applied to determine its part of the Unified Support. Then all the categories are totaled to determine the complete Unified Support contract value, which is considered the baseline. This sizing and pricing process is “fixed” by Microsoft and the end user has no part in determining whether it wishes to include all categories or not. Got it?

Good News! You Have Another Option.

Oakwood’s Essential Support

Oakwood offers two flexible commitment levels as part of its Essential Support offering. This attractive alternative to Microsoft’s Unified Support offers either a ‘Base Plan’ with no long-term commitment, fixed hourly pricing and reactive support. The ‘Excel Plan’ comes with a lower hourly rate attached with a 6 month commitment and is meant more for organizations looking for a true partner that can offer reactive support while becoming familiar with their long-term business objectives.

Rest assured that regardless of the relationship you feel is best for you and your goals – both plans above are serviced by onshore, Oakwood employees that are Microsoft certified.

Oakwood is a certified Microsoft Solutions Partner. This is an extremely important piece in the relationship we have with our clients! Although 98% of the time our team can handle Microsoft related requests in-house, we maintain a clear escalation path to Microsoft should we require additional support.

The Microsoft certified consultants at Oakwood are servicing and implementing Microsoft technologies on a daily basis. We are uniquely positioned to handle your service requests across the entire Microsoft ecosystem of products and services.