Arces works diligently to provide the best service at the lowest cost and with the greatest flexibility.  One of the ways that we're able to do so is by holding fast to a set of standards for all of our customer environments.  We maintain a list of supported hardware and software, and as new hardware models or versions of software come into the market and gain stability, we add them to the list of supported systems and phase out the older ones.  We schedule upgrade projects of hardware and software on at least an annual basis with all of our clients, in order to keep their systems from falling so far behind that they're impossible to update.

Our contract structure is also designed to be flexible.  Knowing that the legal departments of our clients want to pore over the details of a contract, we have a base agreement called the Master Services Agreement (MSA).  The MSA governs the umbrella of the relationship - payment schedule, late fees, breach, confidentiality, etc.  We have one MSA with each Client, and that MSA lasts for 24 months.  Our MSA rarely changes, so the legal department rarely has to get involved.

The details of the work we perform are outlined in a Statement of Work (SOW).  The SOW is attached to the MSA and has all of the details about the specific work, the systems and applications supported, and what level of service our Client has contracted.  An SOW can be for a long-term managed services engagement, or it can be for a short-term project.  In any case the SOW clearly defines the work and the rate.

Attached to the SOW is our Service Level Agreement for the contracted work.  We have two SLAs for managed services, the Enterprise SLA and the Standard SLA.  The Enterprise SLA is the one that our clients choose for their production environments because it covers 24x7 monitoring and response and all of the times within which we deliver service.  The Standard SLA is for development or lower-priority office environments where the criticality of the systems isn't as high.

To reiterate, there is one MSA, one or more SOWs, and each SOW has references the chosen SLA for the systems that it covers.  We've found over the years that constructing our contracts in this fashion makes them easier to understand and easier to process without the overhead of an ongoing legal review.  After all, our objective is to provide you with the best support possible, at the best rate.  The sooner we get started, the better off everyone will be.