Warranties From Iced Tea to Data Center Migration

Do you ever look at the instructions or warranties on household appliances? Yeah, CommScope’s Colleen Murphy-Gomez doesn’t either. But the one time she did, it brought an epiphany. Oddly enough, it has to do with data centers. Read more in this blog post.

CMG_Warranties

I bought myself a fancy iced tea maker for Christmas. Two months later, I finally got around to taking it out of the box. As I was digging through all of the paperwork and parts, I found myself throwing away the instructions and warranty information without even looking at it. After about 10 minutes, I pulled it back out of the trash, curious as to what exactly was covered by a limited one-year warranty. In general I never read or care about warranties; they always sound like they’re written by lawyers, are extremely specific, usually only cover manufacturer’s defects and take 10 calls to customer service to find out that my purchase isn’t covered.

My iced tea machine’s warranty wasn’t really any different. It guarantees that the machine works as stated, but wouldn’t it be great if it guaranteed that it also made great tea? It would be something special if there was a company that put their money where their mouth was and not only covered the bare essentials (of course I expect my purchase to work), but also guaranteed a quality performance.

This whole epiphany came about because I was just recently asking one of our technical experts to explain the details of the CommScope SYSTIMAX System Warranty. What was the big deal about it? I thought, OK, we have a 25-year warranty like everyone else that covers the basics and provides assurances that CommScope parts in a system will work the way we say they will. What I didn’t realize was that we don’t just offer a warranty on parts. CommScope’s SYSTIMAX System Warranty offers warranty protection for the performance of the entire network infrastructure system including compatibility with applications the system is designed to support! This is not simply about product specifications – but the entire system, including the applications it is designed to support.

Application Assurance

As speeds in data centers increase, the advantage of higher quality systems becomes apparent. Moving to 40G or 100G requires a re-evaluation of the physical layer’s capability to meet these needs. The industry standards for cabling components are not enough to ensure future compatibility. This gap is filled by our SYSTIMAX application assurance warranty. The question about whether or not a system as installed will support a next application migration can be answered with confidence for each and every link in the network.

Most warranty guarantees discuss component performance levels but do not discuss the overall link performance. They all fall short of providing a guarantee that your applications – today and in the future – will be supported. Most warranties, including CommScope’s are still written by lawyers. And they want me to be sure you know that the CommScope SYSTIMAX system warranty’s full terms and conditions apply. Now, if only I could be assured of a perfectly brewed cup of tea every day for the next 25 years, I’d be a very happy woman.