Best TAC Services from Equipment Vendors

Thu Mar 7 14:43:42 UTC 2024

With all honesty, if you ask me, my experience with most companies from
China-in relation to Support- has always been fast and super satisfactory
no matter the raised case or sensitivity of the impact to users. I have
always felt comfortable running their gear and gives some sort of
confidence in not having prolonged outages no matter the reasons( engineer
inexperienced, not knowledgeable)

On Thu, 7 Mar 2024 at 09:49, Saku Ytti <saku at ytti.fi> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > michael brooks
> > Sr. Network Engineer
> > Adams 12 Five Star Schools
> > michael.brooks at adams12.org
> > ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
> > "flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss"
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 6, 2024 at 11:25 AM Pascal Masha <pascalmasha at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> 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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>
>
> --
>   ++ytti
>
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