When I meant you get what you pay for, I meant both the customer as well as
BMC..
BMC has obviously cut corners to make support available at more affordable
prices in the face of rising costs of skilled labor in this continent and
continents like Europe and Australia.. The support model that spawns out of
this endeavor, is the most generic support plan they offer when you buy
their products..
However customer has other premium options or choices to choose from....
Do you want to take advantage of the generic low cost support plan, where
you might get a:
1) fresh out of university type agent talking to you, while
2) referencing text books and KB's while on the call with you,
3) and has been trained on the AR and its supporting products for a brief
period,
who is assigned your ticket that gets routed to Asia???
OR
Are you willing and more importantly can you afford to pay top dollar for a
24*7 assigned site engineer who would pick up a call even at 2:00 AM in case
of emergency - who might be based somewhere in the US or Canada.. Or UK if
you are from that region.. I have worked with such support packages and am
yet to get assigned a site engineer who is out of Asia while I have been
based in America. I have mostly got Californians.. Most of these engineers,
have worked with the AR System and its applications in the past, and have a
considerable amount of experience on many other applications which include
underlying databases, the OS, web servers and what have you... Even if some
of them are fairly new to the AR System and its apps, they do tend to
understand you better as language problems is often the case of questioning
the quality of support - not quite the quality of resolution..
In all fairness, having lived in different parts of the world, I personally
do not see language as an issue.. Everyone in different parts of the world
have their preferences when it comes to languages.. While we find it hard to
understand them, believe it or not, as clearly as we may think we talk here,
they find it hard to understand us too.. Given a choice, they too might have
preferred their next ticket to be assigned from somewhere local so they
could understand their customer better..
Anyway coming back to the point of quality of support, if that really has a
high impact on your day to day business and again *more importantly*, if you
can afford to pay more, sure you can buy those premium support packages
where you have available local engineers assigned to you. There is even a
package where you can have *a specific* engineer assigned to you and in
that, which I think is the highest level of support, BMC sometimes even
hires someone local specifically to support you... I've heard that happen on
at least one occasion where a site paid like a zillion on support..
If affordability is an issue, it would just be like my case of - yeah I
would love to own and drive a 100 thousand dollar top of the line fancy
stick shift convertible with a V12 engine, but until I can afford that, I'm
happy with my V6 Mustang..
I am not for or against BMC's way of choosing to do things - looking at it
in their point if view, its perhaps the only way to keep the costs low
enough to make support affordable to some of us who are on the bottom of the
food chain and on a piggy bank budget, who can barely afford the products -
leave alone support.. It’s the way many other vendors are doing business
too.. Its not just BMC.. Look at most DB vendors - I wont take names.. Look
at OS vendors.. Look at even some of our personal banking support.. Where
does it all come from..
I'm sure if we wanted we could ask our banks to give us local support if we
were willing to pay 100 bucks a month to maintain our accounts, and get no
interest paid on our accounts - like Swiss bank accounts..
Just letting you know there are those options.. For more details you might
need to talk to your sales engineer.. I used to work for a VAR way back in
the days so I know these things..
Joe
PS: Having said all this, I have come across a few support engineers, as
inexperienced and young as they might be, who really really know what they
are talking about and not just reading to you out of a previously written
KB.. Use the surveys at the end - and hopefully BMC would evaluate those,
which could help them educate some of their support in areas they are
lacking.. If you feel it was a language issue - let them know.. Be specific
in letting them know where they lacked.. There are language courses in India
that I had heard of where many companies train their employees so they could
learn our accents here.. Constructive criticism sometimes goes a long way in
developing a model you have been trying to build..
-----Original Message-----
From: pritch
Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2012 10:33 AM Newsgroups:
public.remedy.arsystem.general
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Friday funny or not!
I didn't realize there was an option in the BMC support contract (or maybe
there should be) for the type of support you want to purchase - domestic /
international. Or that the pricing went down when the support went "to heck
in a hand basket".
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Martin D'Souza" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2012 5:14:13 PM
Subject: Re: Friday funny or not!
**
You get what you pay for – that’s the bottom-line anywhere... You budget to
build a train and you can’t expect to change plans and build a space ship..
There is talent out there – just that to get the best of it, it costs almost
as much as it does here. And the whole reason they outsource is to that
there is availability of inexperienced talent in vast numbers as well, that
is easily available and that can be paid less.. If they want to hire top
notch professionals supporting their apps out there, they will not save as
much as they project to, by moving support from this more expensive region
to there.. The cost of moving support there itself might have been higher
than the difference in savings..
Look at it this way.. If someone is self aware of his worth to an
organization and is aware he could potentially make 120K upwards a year
somewhere in the world, how likely is he or she to take a 20 or 30K a year
job, even if he or she were living in a 3rd world country out of personal
choice – and I use the words personal choice, because when you are worth
that much, its only your willingness to relocate that can stop or from doing
so... There's not much otherwise that can really stop you..
So what you are really getting, is what you pay for with maybe a 5 to 10%
bargain over the asking market rate just because it is a 3rd world country
that costs slightly lesser to live in – not that much less but a little
lesser than here..
Joe
From: Pat Zandi
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2012 4:47 PM
Newsgroups: public.remedy.arsystem.general
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Friday funny or not!
**
Yeah: gotta love the q&a and the support....
I miss American support! Sorry. But I do!
No offense 3rd world support.
Sent from my iPhone
On May 11, 2012, at 16:02, "Goodall, Andrew C" < [email protected] > wrote:
**
<NULL> push field data in Workflow – not all just some, a mix over base,
overlays and customs would show <NULL> for push field actions despite the
same workflow displaying ok in 7.5 dev studio, and the workflow working as
designed. So we knew it was a display issue in Dev Studio 7.6.04
Clearing the dev studio workspace cache cleared the problem.
<image005.jpg>
<image006.jpg>
Regards,
Andrew C. Goodall
Software Engineer
Development Services
[email protected]
jcpenney
6501 Legacy Drive
Plano, TX 75024
jcp.com
From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList)
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joe Martin D'Souza
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2012 2:54 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Friday funny or not!
**
I’ve never had this happen to me.. so out of curiosity, what are the
symptoms of this corruption?
Joe
From: Goodall, Andrew C
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2012 3:42 PM
Newsgroups: public.remedy.arsystem.general
To: [email protected]
Subject: Friday funny or not!
**
Just got off the phone with BMC support who were trying to explain possible
reasons why the Dev studio workspace cache could corrupt for an issue I was
facing.
The workaround was to clear the workspace cache. I asked them to pursue a
root cause and permanent resolution to the cache corruption.
Support stated “This is why it is our recommendation to continually change
workspaces to avoid corruption”.
I just about choked and spat out my coffee :)
I tried to explain why this was not good software development.
Regards,
Andrew C. Goodall
Software Engineer
Development Services
jcpenney
6501 Legacy Drive
Plano, TX 75024
jcp.com
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