An IT AMC (Annual Maintenance Contract) is a yearly agreement under which an IT company maintains and supports a business's systems for a fixed fee: helpdesk, on-site visits, monitoring, updates, backup checks and vendor management, with response times set out in an SLA. Listonics provides IT AMCs to offices across Dubai.
What an IT AMC covers
- Preventive maintenance: updates, patching, health checks and firmware on servers, network equipment and endpoints.
- Corrective support: helpdesk and on-site engineers when something breaks.
- Monitoring: 24/7 alerts on network, servers, endpoints and backups.
- Security: managed endpoint protection, MFA administration and firewall reviews.
- Backup verification and periodic restore tests.
- Licence and warranty tracking, plus coordination with your ISP and hardware vendors.
- Monthly reporting and a quarterly review of what to improve.
IT AMC vs ad-hoc support
Ad-hoc (break-fix) support is paid per incident or per hour. It is cheap while nothing breaks and expensive — in downtime as much as invoices — when it does, and nobody is paid to prevent the next failure. An AMC flips the incentive: the provider is paid to keep systems working, so updates, backups and warnings are handled before they become outages.
For an office of 10 or more people, with data it cannot lose or a dependence on uptime, an AMC is usually the cheaper option once lost working hours are counted. Very small offices with simple cloud-only setups can reasonably stay on ad-hoc support.
How IT AMC pricing works in Dubai
Most providers, including Listonics, price an AMC per user or per device per month, billed monthly or annually. The main variables are headcount and device count, whether servers or on-premise equipment are included, coverage hours (business hours versus 24/7), the number of on-site visits, and whether hardware repair or only labour is covered.
Listonics quotes a fixed fee after a free assessment and lists every inclusion and exclusion. Read our IT AMC cost guide for a breakdown of what moves the price up or down.
The SLA you should expect
A serious AMC states targets by priority for both remote acknowledgement and on-site attendance. Our standard agreement acknowledges critical, office-wide outages within 15 minutes with same-day dispatch, high-priority issues within 30 minutes with on-site attendance within four business hours, medium issues within two business hours, and handles low-priority requests the same business day.
What is usually excluded — and should be stated
- New projects: office setups, relocations, network redesigns and migrations are quoted separately.
- Hardware replacement parts, unless a parts-inclusive tier is chosen.
- Software licences (Microsoft 365, antivirus) — managed by us, billed at cost.
- Consumables and end-user training beyond onboarding.
Frequently asked questions
Twelve months is standard, billed monthly or annually. Listonics also offers month-to-month managed support for offices that prefer to start small.
Yes. Users and devices can be added or removed and the fee adjusts on the next invoice; larger changes such as adding a server are agreed as an amendment.
Labour is always included. Replacement parts are included only on a parts-inclusive tier; otherwise they are quoted at cost with your approval.
Missed targets are reported in the monthly review with the cause and the fix. Persistent misses are grounds for you to end the agreement early — that is written into it.
Sometimes. If the office runs entirely on cloud apps with a few laptops, a lighter remote-support plan is usually enough; we will say so at the assessment.
Last reviewed September 8, 2026 by the Listonics engineering team.