On Feb 25, 2007, at 11:04 AM, Rick Fochtman wrote:
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I would find it hard to believe that the unnamed vendor with 9-5
support would have strongly objected for a "one of" weekend support.
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You'd be amazed at the number of vendors that will NOT provide
support outside the 9-5 M-F window. I even had a vendor rep hang up
on me in the middle of a call because it was now 5:00 PM where he
was. Some of those (unprintables) are unionized and unions havee
INCREDIBLE power here. Needless to say, our business relationship
with that particular vendor ended the next day. We learned how to
manage without his package and saved ourselves a bundle of $$$
besides.
Names deleted to protect the incompetant. And stoopid!!
Rick,
Agreed. But that is usually after the fact. "we" are not included in
license negotiations so we are typically get to work on the SH*T that
is handed us to install and maintain. I think I have had to deal with
the 9-5 product that is being talked about. IIRC we almost had to
back out a CPU upgrade because of a key failure. Talk about fingers
being pointed (all our way btw). Of course there are others (CA-1 as
an example) that provides excellent coverage at 2 AM btw.
Its bad enough with a single product / vendor. But (in the case of
CA) you can threaten to eliminate all of their products but it will
be a multi year and probably high $$ cost to do so. I know we did it
with one other vendor, Compuware. We did save money and almost no
lost of functionality. As I said one vendor product is usually no
problem its the multi product vendor that is usually the issue (hard
one).
Ed
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