On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 2:24 PM, Brian Long <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> When I worked in the IT dept. supporting our customized RHEL-based > distro, we paid Red Hat for a TAM (technical account manager). The > problems still took 6-9 months to fix in many cases, but our TAM was > fighting for our issues with internal Red Hat product mgmt, engineering, > etc. I have to second the value of a TAM. We just got one, and he's been absolutely invaluable in pushing stuff through that would absolutely fall through the cracks in production support. If you can afford a TAM, I consider it required equipment for deal with Red Hat support. Just for those that may not know - a TAM is a named resource inside Red Hat where all of your support requests go. You have the desk and cell numbers of this person, as well as a web portal (different from the normal system) where you can enter issues. This person is essentially a level 2.5 support resource, and they only handle a small handful of accounts. See http://www.redhat.com/support/policy/soc/tam/ for more > It we just had used Issue Tracker without the TAM, many of our bugs > would have been disregarded or taken over a year (or next major release) > to fix. Well, you can't use Issue Tracker without a TAM, but point taken and agreed :) > Unfortunately this means smaller companies are less likely to have their > critical bugs fix since they cannot afford a support contract with a > TAM. The TAM was invaluable, although he was caught between a rock and > a hard place many times. He understood our needs and wants and he had > to balance them with Red Hat's ability to fix the problems, add features > in the middle of a release, etc. This can definitely be a problem with any vendor. > Having dealt with Novell, Sun, NetApp, etc., I'd say Red Hat is doing a > good job in general (with room for improvement). If you're just paying > your subscription costs and don't have an established service contract, > I don't think it's much better than Bugzilla.... It is, I've used both TAM support and regular subscription support. Production support has gotten me hotfixes for critical issues, and generally had been reasonably responsive (not so much as the TAM, but not so bad that I'd say don't use them). _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
