On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 10:20:55AM -0600, Brett Frankenberger wrote:
I'm referring to the _vendor's_ support costs - as in, you don't need as many people in the TAC if people don't keep running into IOS bugs; you don't need as large of a RMA pool if the hardware is more reliable, etc.
What percentage of TAC personnel's time is spent dealing with calls that ultimately result in a BugID? NANOG isn't representative; mostly, TAC exists to take calls from idiots who bought a box that they don't know how to configure. Large network operators have a staff of people to handle that, so when they call TAC, the box is probably broken. I don't think that's the case with the majority of TAC cases, though.
For most Vendors, depends which TAC and at what level. Having certain letters after your name (Exact combination depends on the Vendor of course) means you get cases picked up in record time by top TAC engineers and if you get Service Provider contracts you can get your "own" TAC engineers/teams to ring when things break. I would imagine most people on NANOG have access at at least one of these methods for their main vendors. Of course, some vendors don't make "end-user" kit and don't have to worry too much about people ringing up we really don't know what they're doing. I've had the misfortune in the past of having to convince vendor engineers from more than one company that I *do* know what I'm doing and that we can dispense with the do-the-LEDs-come-on checklist - now I just go on the web and order what I like, as long as I return the broken kit fairly quickly. Saves me time getting replacement parts and saves the Vendor time as TAC never have to see dead-hardware cases. And peoples time is money, so everyone saves money. -- Ryan O'Connell - CCIE #8174 <ryan@complicity.co.uk> - http://www.complicity.co.uk I'm not losing my mind, no I'm not changing my lines, I'm just learning new things with the passage of time