Best TAC Services from Equipment Vendors

Thu Mar 7 06:49:31 UTC 2024

On Wed, 6 Mar 2024 at 22:57, michael brooks - ESC
<michael.brooks at adams12.org> wrote:

> Funny you should mention this now, we were just discussing (more like lamenting...) if support is a dying industry. It seems as though vendor budgets are shrinking to the point they only have a Sales/Pre-Sales department, and from Day Two on you are on your own. Dramatic take of course, but if we are speaking in trajectories....

My personal experience extending in three different decades is that
there is no meaningful change in support quality or amount of issues
encountered.

Support quality has always been very modest, unless you specifically
pay to have access to named engineers. And this is not because quality
of the engineers changes, this is because vast majority of support
cases are useless cases, and to handle this massive volume support
tries to assume which support cases are legitimate problems, which are
PEBKAC and in which cases the user already solved their problem by the
time you read their ticket and will never respond back. The last case
is so common that every first-line adopts the strategy of 'pinging'
you, regardless how good and clear information you provide, they ask
some soft-ball question, to see if you're still engaged.
Having a named engineer changes this process, because the engineer
will quickly learn that you don't open useless cases, that the issue
you're having is legitimate, and will actually read the ticket and
think about the problem.

To me this seems an inevitable outcome, if your product is popular,
most of its users are users who don't do their homework and do not
respect the support line's time, which ends up being a disservice to
the whole ecosystem, because legitimate problems will take longer to
fix, or in case of open source software, authors just burn out and
kill the project.

What shocks me more than the low quality support is the low quality
software, decades pass along, and everyone still is having
show-stopper level of issues in basic functions on a regular basis,
the software quality is absolutely abysmal. I fear low software
quality is organically market-driven, no one is trying to make poor
NOS, it's just market incentives drive poor quality NOS. When no one
has high quality NOS, there is no reason to develop one, because most
of your revenue is support contracts, not hardware sales, and if the
NOS wouldn't be out-right broken needing to be recompiled regularly to
get basic things working, lot of users might stop buying support,
because they don't need the hand-holding part of it, they just need
working software.
This is not something that vendors actively drive, I'm sure most
companies believe they are making an honest attempt to improve
quality, but it is visible in where investments are put. One vendor
had a very promising project to take a holistic look into their NOS
quality issue, by senior subject matter experts, this project was
killed (I'm sure funding was needed somewhere with better returns),
and the responsible senior person went to Amazon instead.

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> michael brooks
> Sr. Network Engineer
> Adams 12 Five Star Schools
> michael.brooks at adams12.org
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> "flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss"
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> On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 11:25 AM Pascal Masha <pascalmasha at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> Thought about it but so far I believe companies from China provide better and fast TAC responses to their customers than the likes of Cisco and perhaps that’s why some companies(where there are no restrictions)prefer them for critical services.
>>
>> For a short period in TAC call you can have over 10 R&D engineers and solutions provided in a matter of hours even if it involves software changes.. while these other companies even before you get in a call with a TAC engineer it’s hours and when they join you hear something like “my shift ended 15 minutes ago, hold let me look for another engineer”. WHY? Thoughts
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