Many organisations are shifting towards a more responsive IT environment that is at the same time more self-reliant. Manufacturers are striving to enhance customer satisfaction through improved service availability whilst enterprises want to shift the service responsibility away from their IT departments to their suppliers and service providers. Consequently today's service landscape requires collaboration between product manufacturers, their service partners and users of the equipment to maximise the value and uptime of assets.

Traditionally service has been viewed as a reactive process – repairing products when they fail. However, service is now a key competitive differentiator contributing to customer loyalty which can guarantee a higher level of asset availability and drive value, customer loyalty and also profitability. Therefore delivering service excellence centres on ensuring devices are less likely to malfunction in the first place. By providing remote maintenance, vendors can offer predictive support which can trigger preventative action. Not only can this drive service and maintenance-based revenues for the vendor and its channel partners, but it can improve device uptime and availability for the user.