Network Computing's 7th Annual Reader Survey

Thomas LaSusa writes "In this year's reader survey, Network Computing Magazine editors invited IT managers to vent about the tech challenges they face every day and how they wish vendors would address these problems. Read the unvarnished truth about what your peers are thinking." From the article: "This isn't the Top 10 worst vendor list, though. The largest tech companies tend to get the blame because they're the easy targets. Individual experiences with a particular company will vary widely; for every person who blasted Dell or Symantec for poor equipment or lousy service, someone else sang their praises. Instead, we find it more worthwhile to identify key areas where technology vendors as a whole aren't living up to their own boilerplate marketing. Some of the vendors contacted for their reactions to this story explained that today's enterprise networks are bewilderingly complex and run a vast number of OSs, applications and protocols. They all defined customer support as a top priority, but recognized that problems can't be solved by first-level support. Whether you consume or sell technology products, read on for an unvarnished look at what 755 IT decision-makers want — and don't want. You might just come away with new strategies for dealing with your vendors or serving your customers."

Comments

Behold!

[Rob T Firefly]

TFA:

Others have resorted to more extreme tactics--including kidnapping. One respondent said the vendor's own hardware and software engineers disagreed on the problem's source. "I kept them in a conference room and didn't let them leave until they mutually found a solution," he said.

This needs to be the standard for every corporate, political, or other human conflict. It's like a polite version of Thunderdome!

Re:Behold!

[Nos.]

A previous employer once did this with three separate vendors, IBM (Application), Microsoft (OS), and Compaq (Hardware). They had a wonderful circle of blame going on regarding Lotus Notes performing very poorly on a couple of servers. I never did hear what the solution was.

Re:Behold!

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting! I wish I could do that with Dell. Almost 90% of our employee time is spent fighting Dell to either get something shipped, deal with servers that were misconfigured (either to return or get the correct parts shipped), or get repairs. One position here deals with Dell 100% of the time. We've had six different employees in it in less than two years because no one can handle dealing with their crap for long.

My first question would be why do you make us waste so much of both of our times when you haven't shipped something? It would be easier to tell the truth and say it simply hasn't shipped yet. Blaming the trucking company before the servers have even shipped only wastes both of our time. The second quesiton would be why don't you test servers before shipping them? It's easier to fix something in the factory than it is to troubleshoot with a customer over the phone. It's cheaper to simply put the part in the server at the factory than it is to ship them out one by one. There's no telling what Dell wastes in labor to package and ship parts. Finally, I'd ask why it takes so long to get them to dispatch from the local repair shop that handles Dell's local support? Dell knows we're not going away. We'll eventually wear Dell down. Wasting just over ten hours on average of both of our time on the phone to get a repair doesn't help either of us.

Of course since the owner of the company I work for owns a large amount of stock in Dell, we're going to be stuck with this hassle forever. I like everything about this job except having to manage employees that deal with Dell. They hate me for making them do it, and it creates a huge turnover.

Sanctimony

[eltoyoboyo]

From the slide show:

When it comes to open source, IT doesn't mind if the open source community is holier than thou if they can save them time, money, interoperability pain and more.

28% of surveyed agreed that major open source projects are run by sanctimonious elitists. Were the other 72% of the respondents the actual sanctimonious elitists?

Or are thanks in order for the 72% of major open source projects not run by sanctimonious elitists? I for one would like to thank the FileZilla team for building something better than the commercial competitor WS_FTP. And I would like to thank the sourceforge team for providing a repository of plenty of good software not sanctimoniously delivered.

nothing's changed since last century

[MollyB]

As a fossil-sysop now retired, the list of complaints by IT sound depressingly similar to the ones we had, except that the acronyms and buzzwords got flashier.