What an IT AMC actually is — and what it isn't
AMC — annual maintenance contract — is the term most UAE businesses use for what the rest of the world calls managed IT. The vocabulary comes from the region's facilities-management tradition, and it carries an assumption worth challenging: that maintenance means somebody turns up periodically and checks things still work.
A serious IT AMC is not a visit schedule. It is a transfer of responsibility — your provider owns the state of your IT, and site visits are one delivery mechanism among several rather than the product itself.
That distinction is commercial, not philosophical. A contract priced around visits rewards a provider for turning up and finding little to do; a contract priced around outcomes rewards them for there being nothing to turn up for. Read any AMC proposal with one question in mind: what is this provider paid to achieve, rather than paid to attend?
- Remote support in the fixed fee — no per-ticket charges and no meter running while a user explains the problem.
- Proactive monitoring — servers, network hardware, endpoints and the Microsoft 365 tenant monitored automatically, with alerts going to the provider rather than to you.
- Patch and update management — operating systems, firmware and third-party applications on an agreed schedule, not whenever a technician remembers.
- Backup ownership and restore testing — someone accountable both for the fact that the backup ran and for the fact that it restores. A retention policy is not a restore capability.
- Asset and licence records — a live inventory of every device, its warranty date, and every subscription you are paying for.
- User lifecycle and escalation — joiners, movers and leavers handled as routine rather than as an emergency — and a documented list of who gets called, and in what order, when something is urgent.
If a proposal is thin on those and thick on visit frequency, it is a maintenance contract in the older sense of the word.
See how the monthly price is agreed →
What to check in the contract before you sign
Most disagreements between a business and its IT provider are scope disagreements, and they surface at the worst possible moment — mid-incident, with everyone under pressure. The exclusions clause tells you more about an annual maintenance contract than the inclusions list does. Read it first.
- Response versus resolution — an SLA promising a fast response, silent on what happens next, is a promise to answer the phone. Ask what the provider commits to after first contact, and how it differs by priority.
- The exclusions — hardware replacement, software and cloud licences, structured cabling, CCTV and anything classed as "project work" usually sit outside AMC. That is reasonable. Discovering it during an outage is not.
- What counts as a project — an office move, a server replacement, a migration. Agree the boundary in writing, with an indicative rate, before the question arises.
- After-hours, holidays and travel — what the provider's hours are, how holidays and Ramadan are handled, and how onsite visits and travel outside Dubai are arranged and charged — agreed in writing up front.
- Ownership of your data — credentials, network diagrams, asset registers and monitoring history should be yours, exportable, on the day the contract ends. A provider who resists this is quietly describing the cost of ever leaving them.
- Notice and renewal — automatic renewal paired with a long notice window is the most common reason businesses stay with a provider they have outgrown.
- VAT — services in the UAE carry 5% VAT. Make sure competing quotes are being compared on the same inclusive or exclusive basis.
Still weighing AMC against full managed IT? The plain-English comparison →
How we size a plan
We do not sell fixed tiers. Each plan is sized by headcount and complexity together, not headcount alone — thirty staff with an on-premise file server, a firewall, a CCTV system and a warehouse is a materially different job from thirty staff who live entirely inside Microsoft 365.
- What every plan includes — remote support Monday to Saturday, 09:00 to 18:00 Dubai time, every enquiry answered within one business day and anything critical picked up the same day, Microsoft 365 administration, endpoint patching, backup with restore testing, and the customer portal plus knowledge base.
- On site — on site when needed, arranged promptly. No fixed visit counts to argue over.
- What is added as you grow — Defender for Business, Veeam backup for Microsoft 365, compliance and audit support, and more frequent reviews, added where your business needs them and priced into the same fixed monthly fee.
Every plan includes the customer portal, so ticket history and your asset register are things you can look at rather than things we report. Plan changes happen at renewal — we would rather adjust a plan when the business has genuinely grown than sell the largest scope on day one.
How IT AMC pricing works in Dubai
Three pricing models are in common use across the UAE market. Per-user pricing is clearest for businesses whose work lives in Microsoft 365 and whose device count tracks headcount. Per-device pricing suits environments with a lot of unattended hardware — point-of-sale terminals, cameras, kiosks, servers — where users are a poor proxy for workload. A flat annual fee suits stable estates where neither number moves much, and it is the model most often described as a classic AMC.
What actually moves the number: user and device counts, number of sites, how much still runs on-premise, how much planned out-of-hours work you need, and — often underestimated — the condition of the environment at handover. An undocumented network that has "evolved" for six years costs more to take on in year one, because someone has to do the archaeology before they can do the maintenance.
Be careful with the cheapest quote. An unusually low AMC price almost always means visits are the product and everything substantive is chargeable on top. Two questions expose it quickly: what proportion of a comparable client's work fell outside contract last year, and what does an out-of-scope hour cost?
We quote after looking at the estate, not from a headcount over the phone. If you would rather start with something smaller and fixed-scope, our Cyber Posture Assessment is published at AED 7,500 — about two weeks from the agreed start date, and a written report of where you actually stand.
See what the Cyber Posture Assessment covers →
The first 90 days of an AMC
Onboarding is where an annual maintenance contract is won or lost. A provider who starts answering tickets on day one without doing the groundwork is guessing for the rest of the term. Our sequence, roughly:
- Weeks 1–2 — discovery — every device, server, switch, firewall, licence, subscription and domain recorded. Administrative credentials collected and moved into managed storage, so nobody is emailing passwords six months from now.
- Weeks 2–4 — instrumentation — patch policies set, and backup jobs verified by performing an actual restore rather than trusting a green tick.
- Weeks 3–6 — the obvious remediation — MFA gaps, unsupported operating systems, expired warranties, firewall firmware years behind. Many inherited estates have several of these, and they are cheap to close early.
- Weeks 6–12 — documentation and rhythm — network diagram, runbooks, escalation list, then the first review with a costed plan for the year ahead.
By the end you should be able to hand a new IT manager a folder and have them understand your environment in an afternoon. That is also the test of whether a provider is building an asset for you or a dependency on them.
We take on a small number of new clients at a time, so every onboarding gets this attention.