Many firms are looking at ways to reduce IT costs in the current climate.

One area that is often overlooked is support contracts. When purchasing a system it is often the case that not much thought is given to the costs and nature of the support contract, with firms often taking the standard support package offered by the vendor.

As a result many firms end up paying over the odds for support that they may not really need.

Now is a good time to review your support contracts and potentially renegotitate them on better terms.

Consider things such as:

1) How often have you used the support facilities in the past? In some cases it may be better not to have a support contract but simply to pay  for resolving problems on an incident by incident basis.

2) Do you really need the level of support cover that you currently have? For example if you have 24/7 or out of hours support do you really need this or would normal business hours coverage be sufficient? Also look at the response times and fix times that you currently have and see if these are appropriate.

3) Shopping around. For general PC, server and network support there are many companies to choose from and market is very competitive. For specialist systems and packages you may not have this option.

4) Try and renegotiate the terms of the contract so that you pay less per annum possibly in exchange for agreeing to extend the overall length of the contract.  Vendors that value your business and want to develop a long term relationship with you will normally be open to this.

 5) Are you using all the modules and features of the system that you initially purchased support for? With practice management systems for example it is common for firms to buy a range of additional modules (e.g. CRM, records management, web publishing etc) and never actually implement them or to stop using them after a period of time. If this is the case then you should not be paying support costs for these parts of the system if at all possible.

6) Consider bringing in a firm of cost reduction consultants to see if they can reduce your IT support costs while maintenaning a level of cover that is acceptable to the firm. Many of these companies work on the basis that they get paid a percentage of the cost saved so you have little to loose.