In my experience, the big companies providing support often ends up being the ones that give me a headache. A few examples from real life:
1. We had a $300k predictive dialer from a (then) well known telephone equipment provider. We depreciate the investment over 5 years. After 3 years, the provide had been sold to a bigger company that stopped actively supporting the product. Suddenly, even the most obvious bugs (and there were many) in their system was really a feature upgrade that was only available for customers running their latest and greatest. We were left stranded with the choice of throwing another $2-300k dollars at the new company for their new "superior" dialer or support a proprietary solutions on our own. We opted for the second alternative and before 5 years had passed, the company was sold again and our version of the product dropped altogether.
2. We invested even more money in an Avaya switch. The local support in our little Nordic country was more or less nonexistent at the time. So we opted to buy support from another company in our group who had the expertise. After 2 years, Avaya did have support support but we couldn't buy it from them since parts of our PBX was already "out of sale" and would be "out of support" within 1 year. Instead, we were forced into a $200k upgrade.
3. We had roughly 200 Dell Optiplex SX280 in production, running XP. A lot of these machines have an inherit problem with their motherboard that causes them to overheat. Dell acknowledged the problem and extended the factory warranty to 5 years so that all machines had time to break while we could still get an free exchange motherboard. Only problem was that they had failed to mention that it wasn't really a 5-year warranty, they had limited it to a specific date less than 60 days into the future counting from the date when we first learned about the "5-years warranty".
4. We have rented an issue tracking system from a well known software developer. Since their system didn't really live up to what their salesman had promised us, they ended up doing a lot of custom work for us to fix a few of the problems. After 1 year, they released a new version that would have fixed a lof of the remaining problems we had. Needless to say, our customizations was not portable to their new version, so we ended up ditching their system to develop a derivate from a GPL'ed solution instead. Sure, we could have taken them to court, but in real life, we need to focus on delivering services to our customers.
In my experience (12 years in the business) enterprise support is about paying twice for everything and having someone to meet in court when sh**t hits the fan.
Since a few years back, my strategy is to hire skilled technicians and staying close to the main stream of open source software (=Ubuntu + Asterisk for this call center). From a 24*7 production perspective, that's the safest way.
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I collegue of mine with an excellent track record as IT and R&D manager in the European Call Center industry once said (and I agree):
- "if the application is mission critical, then we need the source"
In my experience, the big companies providing support often ends up being the ones that give me a headache. A few examples from real life:
1. We had a $300k predictive dialer from a (then) well known telephone equipment provider. We depreciate the investment over 5 years. After 3 years, the provide had been sold to a bigger company that stopped actively supporting the product. Suddenly, even the most obvious bugs (and there were many) in their system was really a feature upgrade that was only available for customers running their latest and greatest. We were left stranded with the choice of throwing another $2-300k dollars at the new company for their new "superior" dialer or support a proprietary solutions on our own. We opted for the second alternative and before 5 years had passed, the company was sold again and our version of the product dropped altogether.
2. We invested even more money in an Avaya switch. The local support in our little Nordic country was more or less nonexistent at the time. So we opted to buy support from another company in our group who had the expertise. After 2 years, Avaya did have support support but we couldn't buy it from them since parts of our PBX was already "out of sale" and would be "out of support" within 1 year. Instead, we were forced into a $200k upgrade.
3. We had roughly 200 Dell Optiplex SX280 in production, running XP. A lot of these machines have an inherit problem with their motherboard that causes them to overheat. Dell acknowledged the problem and extended the factory warranty to 5 years so that all machines had time to break while we could still get an free exchange motherboard. Only problem was that they had failed to mention that it wasn't really a 5-year warranty, they had limited it to a specific date less than 60 days into the future counting from the date when we first learned about the "5-years warranty".
4. We have rented an issue tracking system from a well known software developer. Since their system didn't really live up to what their salesman had promised us, they ended up doing a lot of custom work for us to fix a few of the problems. After 1 year, they released a new version that would have fixed a lof of the remaining problems we had. Needless to say, our customizations was not portable to their new version, so we ended up ditching their system to develop a derivate from a GPL'ed solution instead. Sure, we could have taken them to court, but in real life, we need to focus on delivering services to our customers.
In my experience (12 years in the business) enterprise support is about paying twice for everything and having someone to meet in court when sh**t hits the fan.
Since a few years back, my strategy is to hire skilled technicians and staying close to the main stream of open source software (=Ubuntu + Asterisk for this call center). From a 24*7 production perspective, that's the safest way.