totally drowning in jargon. VAR, channel partner, OEM, warrenty support, reseller...... super dumb question, but what's the term for the company you can actually ring in an outage who physically send you out replacement gear when your gear breaks ? Just realized i've never actually needed to set up that relationship from scratch in a company before. It's a channel partner, right ?

at the moment i'm almost at starting phone calls with 'hi, are you the dudes i need to ring when our shit breaks ?'

@Sirex that's almost too late.

Most of the time there should be a service contract. At my last job, we bought directly from (large OEM everyone hates) - we just used their webpage or called their support line.

every place i've been up to now it's been so set in stone with who to ring and such that i've never actually had to walk the BS gauntlet. I'm buying the gear direct off a website, and i know it's got a 1 year warrenty on it from there, but i'm guessing i'm meant to have a service contract with... someone... to support it properly (hardware replacement / etc).

this place is way smaller than any place i've been so far, so we dont seemto have account managers, or known points of contact to call. at the moment it's one a shoe string

on*

we've literally got less than 3 bits of gear to support in each country at the moment. So it seems like a good time to get the relationships put in place.