When you are considering buying TPM entitlements for your devices, you should fully understand who you are buying from, who is delivering the service and how things will be handled if they go wrong.  If the person you are buying from can't give you those answers, then you should be very skeptical.

Anyone can sell TPM. There are white label TPM service providers that support this re-sale activity. The white label providers do not expose themselves to end users during the sales process but you will be dealing with them if you ever open a ticket to use your TPM entitlement. This is not necessarily bad but you should work to expose this during the sales process. If it is the case, your seller may not want to disclose this.  Do not assume that the same entity/company selling you the TPM service is delivering it. 

         You should know the person or entity who is selling you the TPM. You should not be considering the purchase of TPM entitlements based on a cold call, or a sounds-too-good-to-be-true unsolicited offer. The claims of value by someone you do not know or otherwise have a buying relationship with offering you TPM are typically grossly inflated to get your attention. Be skeptical of a seller who answers all of your questions about TPM with emphatic affirmations.  TPM has inherent risk and a seller who does not acknowledge this is not doing you any favors.

The real value with TPM is based on your service experience should you need to use your entitlement. Price is almost irrelevant if the service can't be delivered to you well. Many sellers don't deliver or have anything to do with the actual delivery of the service. They may work hard to obfuscate the fact that they are reselling someone else's service, as noted above. So ask lots of questions and demand specifics around the answers. Where do I open tickets? Have the seller show you the web page or give you the phone number or e-mail address. Don't let them sell you on price and price alone.  A low price for a completely resold service may not produce the experience you are looking for or expecting. Don't assume that Seller A, Seller B and Seller C are all selling the same service experience.  Understand the tradeoffs - maybe a diminished service experience that you have to more actively manage is what you can get by with and what you have budget for. 

THE SLA (Service Level Agreement) QUANDARY

Most buyers expect that their SLA decisioning is around when they get their replacement part. The truth is however, most TPM service experiences are going to provide a service level no greater than Next Business Day in regards to replacement parts or units. Forward stocking of replacement parts is expensive and difficult to manage for most TPM service providers so they don't invest too heavily in it. Instead they sell their "same day" SLAs around field engineer arrival, because that is a far easier SLA to meet. They can much more easily get a field engineer to site within four hours in most populous zip codes than they can a replacement for a specific failed part. So it is a fool's errand to make your requirement same day replacement parts (or units), delivered to you on-site within four hours. Every TPM provider can easily get parts overnighted to your location, so that should be your general requirement. If you need same day replacement parts, buy your own and stock them where you want them, especially for older gear where the market price will be more favorable to you.

The point of the above paragraph is to be wary or very skeptical of a seller who offers you a 4-hour SLA as the price of the competition's NBD SLA. A field engineer on site in a known failed part situation within four hours but having no part is of very limited value. In those cases, your TPM service provider will defer the service until part arrival, which will likely be next day. In some cases, with a larger service provider, you may get lucky and actually get the replacement within four hours. But if you read the SLA fine print, they will not guarantee it in all situations and most will explain that they only stock high fail parts locally for only popular makes and model. So if you have a low fail part in a less common make or model, you are out of luck.

THE TECHNICAL PROWESS QUANDARY

Many TPM sellers go to market with a message that they have technical support aptitudes that are just as good as the OEMs.  They will tell you that they employ field technicians who used to work for OEMs and that their backline technical experts used to work for the OEM. While this may be true, and it does potentially hold some value for you, it should not be a differentiator in entitlements to commodity items like Catalyst switches or Dell PowerEdge servers.  For the most part, you need a TPM as a source for replacement parts that fail, and you need a basic level of technical support in performing the action of replacing the failed unit or part in question.  So don't take that bait unless you need it.

For complex devices such as storage arrays with very intricate configurations and replacement part procedures, technical prowess is more important to you as a buyer, especially if you haven't developed any expertise in this area and have relied on your reseller or integrator to guide or support you through operating and maintaining your complex device. Understand that your OEM aligned reseller or integrator can't or will refuse to overtly work with a third party maintenance provider to fill this technical prowess gap. So that's why many TPMs, especially in the storage and complex compute device space, will offer to fill this gap.  Assess whether you need it and walk them through how you handle break/fix with the device today to determine if the TPM provider can fulfill your requirements. 

Understand that even the most capable or most technically proficient TPM service provider will not be able to match the features and benefits that you will receive from a full OEM entitlement purchased through an authorized reseller. The OEM programs dwarf the size of anything a TPM can offer and their reseller channel offers a wide breadth of integration and support capabilities that just don't exist in the TPM space. TPM sellers can easily exaggerate and misconstrue the capabilities of what they can support from a technical perspective because they are incentivized to positively enumerate their benefits but most lack the perspective to understand where they fit and where they do not. They push that risk off on you as the buyer to evaluate as part of the normal sales process and you should be fully aware of that risk.

THE SOFTWARE ENTITLEMENT QUANDARY

TPM service providers can not provide you with or sell you entitlement to OEM software. Unless they are authorized resellers (which they aren't by definition) they can't sell valid entitlements to OEM software or provide you with it legally.  This is a fundamental fact, almost to the point where you can use this as a litmus test. Anyone who can tells you they can sell or give you code alongside a TPM entitlement is not being truthful. There is software that you can "go get" yourself on your own without entitlement, but you hold the risk on that. You can't buy an entitlement to software through a TPM provider. 

You as end user may have entitlement rights to your software that are unrestricted by the OEM provider. It depends on the device. Policies deviate from manufacturer to manufacturer, and within manufacturers, from product line to product line.  The entitlement restrictions are subject to the competitive market pressures on the device in that some disruptive manufacturers will not lock down software update entitlements as a feature available to buyers for the lifetime of the device. Dell, for example, locks down some devices to only active paid for entitlements but offers software on a lot of its server products without restriction to end users. Typically restricted entitlements are controlled by serial number. If you go to get a software or firmware update for a device and you are prompted for a serial number or asked to log in to your account, you can reasonably assume that you have a restricted entitlement situation. 

Often times, software updates will be included during the warranty period of the device. In those cases, many end users will download those updates and archive them so they have access to them beyond their entitlement access period. Again, policies vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and device to device so research this for your equipment that you are considering buying TPM entitlements for.

Some TPM sellers will give you candid advice on what they know about these entitlements, and it should be cautionary in nature. A TPM seller who minimizes the risk of this subject is not being forthright.

Another thing to consider is the operational need for software or firmware updates for devices. Not all of them are security based in nature or fix issues that are common to every end user. If a device is operating within spec in your environment at one release behind recommended today, what do you gain by paying for a software entitlement that you may not use? Or retiring the device before its useful life is over because you don't want to pay for access to software that may not add any value to your continued operation of the device in production? Infosec requirements that mandate being on the latest release don't necessarily offer real protection and often force financial decisions that can have a large negative impact on the business. Those should be examined in terms of the risk reduction they intend to bring and whether it can be realized in other ways, such as a change in configuration on the device.