Tsnww,
I was a long time AT&T/Lucent/Avaya customer, then an Avaya Employee and now I work for an Avaya Business Partner.
As a customer I was responsible for a bunch of Definitys of all different sizes in multiple states, and all but 4 of my switches had Lucent/Avaya maintenance, the other 4 were through a 3rd party. One of the switches never had an issue, the other three had many more problems than any of the ones under maintenance. Although most of the issues were quite minor and required little more than a busyout and release type fix, many times they caused outages for trunks and stations. If these switches had had “real” maintenance and reported alarms to Denver, I most likely would never have known there was an issue, and service would not have been disrupted.
As an Avaya Employee, I worked with a number of customers that had terminated there maintenance with Avaya and gone to a 3rd party. Beyond the same type of issues that I experienced as a customer, the biggest problem that they reported was that the 3rd party maintenance contractors could not handle anything much beyond replacing boards, and when there was a serious system issue (as rare as they are) Avaya would have to be called on to fix the problem. Although the cost of Avaya’s involvement was covered by the 3rd party, Avaya’s response time and dedication to fixing these problems was real bad. I believe that this is related to two issues; the first being the fact that the Techs know that the 3rd parties are taking away there jobs, and the second being Avaya is losing money to these maintenance contractors, and therefore place there issues at the bottom of the priority list.
In my personal opinion, if you just want to save money, go with the one of the lowest level of Maintenance from Avaya like “Parts plus remote support” or just “remote support.” With either of these you will get the main benefit of Maintenance which is the remote diagnostics and repair. These options are most likely more expensive than the 3rd party offers, but less than traditional maintenance, and I believe that it is well worth it.
Just my two cents worth!
I hope this helps!
IPSI