These terms and conditions are in addition to our general terms and conditions. Please consult our terms and conditions page for general information relating to terms and conditions.

Remote Access

Remote access via an ADSL connection of at least 1.5/256 is required. Whilst a fibre optic connection is our preferred option, ADSL2+ will generally deliver enough bandwidth. You are also required to provide an onsite technician for any hardware related failures.

Reporting Faults

Faults must be reported via our main telephone number, 03 8888 5361 or +61 3 8888 5361 for international customers. Standard technical support requests (tasks that can be scheduled for a later date and time) should either be emailed to support@stuartelvish.com or lodged by telephone.

When you ring in to lodge a support request (standard, urgent or critical), you will be required to provide the following information:

• Your organization name.
• Your personal name; we will make contact with you directly.
• Your personal and direct telephone number.
• Your organizations maintenance and service level agreement number.
• A description of the fault.

Normally, you will reach our communications system and be asked to enter your agreement number and your details compared against our database. You will then be presented with a menu to select the severity of outage (standard, urgent or critical) and another menu prompting for data about the outage. You will then be asked to key in your telephone number, record your personal and organization name as well as a more detailed description of the fault. Once this is done, we will forward your call to one of our staff members. If one of our staff members is not available immediately to take your call, we will ask you to hang up the phone and pager messages will be sent to the appropriate staff; the first one available will call you back.

From time to time, you may be sent directly to our paging service (if for example there is a problem with our telephone line). If your call is answered directly by our backup messaging service, please provide your name, telephone number, agreement number, fault severity and a brief message. This will be paged to us and we will respond as soon as possible.

Onsite Technicians

We do not provide on site technicians. You are required to provide an onsite technician whenever you have lodged a service request to assist us with hardware related testing and replacement. This onsite technician must have the appropriate qualifications and security clearances to access all areas where the equipment related to the SLA is located.

Spare Hardware

An initial fee is charged for setting up an SLA agreement with each client. This fee is nominal and covers a portion of the time taken to advise of the spare hardware we will require you to store on site. You must keep, at all times, the minimum level of hardware we request for use during a service request. Failure to do so will possibly interfere with our ability to fix your problem, and in exceptional circumstances, to correctly identify the problem.

Equipment Covered Under Our SLA

We only cover equipment supplied by one of our approved partners. The exact equipment that we cover under the SLA will be clearly written on the initial SLA agreement. Generally, we only agree to cover Asterisk software and the required components of Linux to run Asterisk, as well as advice on which hardware components may require replacing to make the system fully operational again.

Under our service level agreements, we do not cover any external network or exchange line outages. These types of outages must be covered by the supplier of these links. You will be responsible for covering all costs incurred in diagnosing any faults including those related to third parties products, including but not limited to, exchange lines, external network links and internal network issues.

Response Times

We aim to have a technician talking to your technical staff within the response time indicated on your SLA. The response time is generally indicated by the monthly fee you pay. For example, the monthly fee will say "SLA - 24x7 - 2 Hour Response" which means you have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week of coverage where we have to contact you within 2 hours to start resolving your issue.

Resolution Times

The response time is not related to the resolution time. Resolution refers to our being able to provide you with a clear definition of what the problem is and how it can be fixed, or a list of factors that may be creating the problem which will require further investigation. Based on this, we will have completed our requirements under the service level agreement if:

• We can fix the problem without causing further detriment to the system;
• We are unable to fix the problem, or the testing to locate the problem may cause further detriment to the system, we will contact you for further instructions.

We do not provide a service level agreement with an agreed resolution time.

'Man Hours'

When you log a critical task with us, we will normally only require one technician to be assigned to your case. If we believe that we can resolve the fault affecting your system in a more effective manner and expedite resolution by assigning additional resources to the task, we reserve the right to put additional 'man hours' into resolving the fault. This will be reflected on your invoice; basically for every hour that an additional technician assists in resolving the task, there will be multiple 'man hours' charged to your account.

Contact During An Open Critical Task

When you lodge a critical task with us which requires resolution within the times promised by your service level agreement, we will contact you initially when a technician is assigned to your task and the technician will provide you with some direct contact details. Once this initial contact has been provided, we will contact you every hour to provide you with an update. You are free to contact our technician as many times as you like whilst they are working to restore your service, however in some circumstances this may reduce the effectiveness of our staff as it may interfere with them completing the fault diagnosis and resolution as quickly as possible.

Availability

We service the requirements of many different clients. There may be times when we are unable to start work on your critical support request because we have already assigned all our resources to other clients, or where another client has a high level of service agreement. Where we are unable to provide you the required response times, we will provide you with compensation.

If we are already working on your task and a critical support request from a client with a higher service level agreement is logged, and the task is more critical, we reserve the right to attempt to finish your task, or where this is not practicable, to temporarily re-assign resources. In the rare event of this happening, we will be in contact to with you to discuss any impact on your task.

Failure To Meet Service Level

If we fail to respond to your request for critical support within the time agreed in your maintenance and service level agreement, we will provide you with a partial refund of your monthly maintenance and service level agreement fee excluding any credits for consulting or support work. This refund will be as follows:

• If we fail to meet the required initial response time, but do respond within an additional hour of the required initial response time, we will rebate 25% of your monthly service level agreement fee excluding any credits for consulting or support work.
• If we fail to meet the required initial response time, but do respond within an additional 2 hours of the required initial response time, we will rebate 50% of your monthly service level agreement fee excluding any credits for consulting or support work.
• If we fail to meet the required initial response time, and either do not respond at all or respond later than an additional 4 hours of the required initial response time, we will rebate 75% of your monthly service level agreement fee excluding any credits for consulting or support work.

Please note that a maximum of one rebate per month will be applied to your account. The rebate offered will be the first event in the month. For example, if the first rebate is $1,000 and the second rebate is $1,500, we would only provide a reimbursement of $1,000. If, for example, we reverse the situation and the first rebate is $1,500 and the second $1,000, we would rebate $1,500 in accordance with the other terms and conditions set out in this document.

If we fail to respond due to system outages, natural disasters or any other major event which prevents us receiving notification of your service request (even though some of our systems may have logged your request), we will still provide a refund according to the conditions above.

Rebates are applied to the next invoice we issue you. For example, if you qualified for a rebate in February, we would apply the rebate to the invoice issued for March. The rebate would be the appropriate percentage of February's service level agreement monthly fee.

Limitation Of Liability

Whilst our technicians will take due care whilst restoring service to your system or providing advice, human error does occur and you release us from any direct or consequential damages which may arise from our work on your system.

Service Level Agreements Including Credit

Some of our Service Level Agreements include a certain amount of credit which can be used for lodging urgent and scheduled service requests as well as requesting additional consulting. This credit is only valid for the month which the service level agreement membership fee is paid and can not be carried over to another month, or retrospectively applied to a previous invoice.

Price Changes

Whilst we don't foresee the need to change pricing, we reserve the right to make changes to the monthly minimum commitment as required. We will be provide you with a minimum of one months notice, however we will aim to provide three months notice of any expected price increases or changes. We also reserve the right, after giving appropriate notice, to either discontinue the maintenance and service level agreements that we offer, or to adjust the credit we include with each package.

Payment Of Fees

All service level agreement monthly membership fees are due, and must be cleared, at the first of the month or we will be able, at our sole discretion, to determine whether or not we will provide coverage under the SLA. Any fees incurred above the included credit (if any) of your service level agreement will be invoiced immediately and fall due within 7 days.

Please note that if you fail to pay any additional or standard monthly membership charges by the due date, we will not be obliged to render assistance to you should you require support under an SLA.