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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