Best Unix Support?

[Dan Matlock_1]

It seems my companies 'pro' IBM person is at it again, and basically trying to convince my management that IBM Unix support is better. http://www.gabrielconsultinggroup.com/pressrelease2005121301.php?PHPSESSID=1fe7e59b9ef6e10ccca644762ef24fca
Question is, does anyone know of something I can use to counter this???

[Geoff Wild]

Where does it say "IBM Unix Support is better"?

Where is rest of report? (oh - you have to purchase it)...

1st section says "Technology Criteria: 13 separate categories" -yet they only post a couple of bullets...


HP was number one with customers in terms of producing the most value for the service dollar.

Show me a site like the ITRC on IBM....

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=982633

Rgds...Geoff

[Rick Garland]

I read the doco. Questions, what criteria was used to select the participants? Is there some randomness? Was type of demographics were used?

There are many variables involved in choosing the participants and these can skew the results big time.

Without some blurb describing how participants were choosen and the margin of error, how can you trust these statistics?

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

I would say that most participants in this forum view HP's HP-UX support as the best in the industry. HP was one of the first companies to provide their Unix, networking and software product documentation online, and the ITRC (this forum is part of the IT Resource Center) has no equal in breadth and depth of coverage.

I'm not familiar with the research company publishing the report. You may want to look at other industry research companies just to get a broad perspective. Gartner, Inc is a good research company.

It should be noted that most industry reports on support services are focused on mid to large companies as these companies purchase extensive hardware and software support contracts. HP does an outstanding job in providing non-contract (or self-support) help from the ITRC.

[Dan Matlock_1]

Thank you all for the info. FYI I am on the day-to-day production side and pro-HP-UX, but my company has a senior AIX person on the Planning side. Unfortunetly for me he has managements ear in meetings and trying to propose a switch in HW.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Gabriel Consulting wrote an anti-Itanium paper a couple of years ago for IBM - I wouldn't exactly call them neutral observers of the marketplace...

Also, have a look at the link at the bottom of this page:

http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug110305-story02.html

You will notice its an invitation to take part in this very survey you describe in your post (you can't follow the link any more).

This suggests to me that this was an 'online' survey.

Well we all know how reliable these sorts of survey are - all it takes is a few phone calls from IBM marketing to their most 'loyal' customers and all of a sudden WOW IBM has great support an their customers love em!

I think if you look around the web a little more, you will find plenty of evidence that IBM's AIX support 'stinks'.

HTH

Duncan

[Jeff_Traigle]

Some anecdotal perspective on IBM vs. HP support. The comapny I worked for a few years back outsourced the IT origanization to IBM so I became an IBM "insider" for the 10 months I tolerated it. I've also had two occasions of trying to use IBM support as an outsider.

IBM's support organization is so fragmented and huge, no one knows what anyone else does. They are also still very mainframe oriented. I called about a printing issue at my last assignment. It was an old IBM printer and they were trying to use some software from IBM. The software README said it was supported and gave a number for support. I called it. It was a pre-sales support number. Ok. The woman gave me the "right" number. Called it. Explained my problem. I then spent an hour on the phone being bounced back and forth between the printer group (even though I told them there was nothing wrong with the printer itself) and the mainframe group (even though I told them I was not using a mainframe). I was eventually told that they (IBM) didn't support the product. I was not a happy camper and let them know that if they aren't going to support something they shouldn't post the software on their web site and state in the documentation that they will. They left me a voicemail a while later saying they found out otherwise and gave me another number to call, but by then I'd managed to identify the problem on my own so didn't bother talking to them any longer.

Granted, that was unpaid support, but I haven't seen any great difference on the paid side either. I worked in a large data center briefly where they had paid support from IBM. On-site IBM support follows IBM general philosophy... don't do anything you don't have to do or aren't explicitly being paid to do. HP CEs have always been very helpful for things like replacing failed drives... they'll do all the LVM stuff for you if you want them to, in my experience. IBM charges extra for that and the hardware guys who replace the hardware don't know the OS side at all or do a good job of playing dumb if they do.

From my perspective, I guess there's one way I'd see IBM support as great... if you know so much yourself that you don't need them. :)

[Dan Matlock_1]

Thanks a million, all views were kinda what I've seen/heard from the past. Its good to hear from others so I have better perspective. My company (before my time) did outsource to IBM Global for about a year, which failed!!! Alot of us are new hire to rebuild the Data Center back under company ownership/management, but some old school IBMers still lurk.........

[Dan Olds]

Hi Dan, I'm Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group and the author of our 4Q UNIX Vendor Preference Survey that was discussed in a thread on the HP-UX forum. I stumbled on the discussion with a google search and wish I had found it sooner so that I could answer some of the questions raised about the survey.

I don't know how much space I have for this message, but I'll address a couple of the questions here...

1) This survey was not sponsored by any vendor. We make the data and resulting research reports available for vendors to purchase, but vendors do not have any access to or influence on the actual survey.
2) It was a web-based survey, but no vendor was given (directly or indirectly) the url fo r the survey or notice when the survey was conducted.
3) We go through each and every survey response to make sure it is from a valid customer and not from a vendor posing as a customer.
4) There was quite a bit of good news in the survey for HP. My eyes were opened quite a bit by the solid level of support for HP, HP-UX, and HP's overall customer support and strategy. I was particularly surprised by the margin of HP's win over Sun. Going into the survey, I would have predicted that Sun and IBM would be vying for leadership with HP in 3rd place. This belief was based on anecdotal info I was receiving from my client base and the market as a whole. To see HP soundly beat Sun and contest IBM in many categories has led me to change my preconceived notions about the market and HP's strength in UNIX. As they say, real data drive out speculation.

If you (or anyone else, for that matter) have more questions about the survey, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer them.

Dan Olds

[Aaron Hunt_1]

My only experience with IBM would be thier installation engineers for a Zseries. They left a pallet(wooden) about 10 boxes and 1-2 cubic meters of trash. When asked to remove it.
"We don't take out trash"
Too bad they then ended up needing to be escorted and lost those nice green vendor I.D.'s