[Info-vax] VMS Software, Inc. Launches Performance SWAT Team Service

[terry+googleblog at tmk.com]

On Wednesday, August 26, 2015 at 6:22:21 PM UTC-4, Richard Maher wrote:
> That is indeed a cunning plan Baldrick! Get the local VMS talent to tell 
> you exactly where all the turnips are and then you come in on your own 
> and pick them under their noses.
> 
> I know one Perth shop that's been talking to Sue. I wonder how they and 
> others feel now about divulging customer business relationships.

I don't have any irons in this fire, but it seems like a good thing to me, overall. Some customers will want to work with "the manufacturer" to get Warm Fuzzies(TM) while other customers will prefer to work with consultants, either for reasons of expertise (one consultant I know of specializes in working with nuclear power stations, for example), local presence / odd-hour support, and so on. In general, it would seem that the VSI SWAT teams would be more focused on operating system and hardware integration issues, while consultants can provide more in-depth experience with the user's applications and specific requirements. In some cases I can see both the SWAT team and consultant(s) working on different aspects of a customer's needs.

Whether the SWAT concept expands or not depends a lot on how successful VSI becomes. On the small end, the customer base doesn't justify that sort of thing, while on the large end you end up burning out top-quality people* and end up simply hiring bodies to read the manual to the customer over the phone.

* For a good part of TGV's existence, one of the key selling points of MultiNet was "you get to talk to a real developer" when you phoned for support. [I can remember one Easter weekend when I was on the phone with Ken regularly, tracking down an odd interaction between MultiNet NFS and cluster-wide disk mounts, for example.]

Eventually you get enough customers that the developers get burned out from silly questions. That's the dangerous point - when you simply start hiring people to sit in chairs and read the manual to people who call. Or worse, saying "Your call is important to us. Give us the details and someone will get back to you." and you eventually get a non-answer to some unrelated question from someone who doesn't natively speak English from a dozen timezones away.

If VSI isn't successful, VMS dies and consultants will be needed to bury the bytes in a shallow grave (a lot of which was already happening). If VSI is moderately successful, both VSI and consultants will be providing related (but different) services. If VSI becomes wildly successful, there will be an increased need for consultants due to both the larger number of customers and talent being spread thinner in the VSI SWAT team.