Re: Final Source
Yes, nothing worse than standing in the middle of a battlefield with a piece of equipment that doesn't work and half a dozen suppliers all pointing the fingers at each other and doing nothing to help.
At a software company I worked for, many of the customers wanted the servers, PCs, printers and other hardware (PLC, scales etc.) to all come through us. If something went wrong, there was, generally, a 15 minute window to get things running again, before damage in 6 figures occur. The last thing they needed was a server manufacturer claiming that they only support during business hours - the customer's business hours were usually midnight through to 11 in the morning. Likewise, they didn't want to hear anything about a 4 hour response time. When they rang at 2 in the morning with a stopped production line, they wanted somebody to deal with it and get it running again, straight away!
Obviously, if the customer had saved money on a redundant server and the main server broke, there wasn't much that could be done. But for "normal" emergencies, the person on the helpdesk knew the hardware, the software and the customer's production line, so there was no finger pointing, just someone getting on with fixing the problem.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
