HP-UX third party support

[Jeff_Traigle]

I have a feeling that the quality of support from HP goes hand in hand with how big of a customer you are (and how much you spend with them). We've had many problems with HP support in the past few years. My coworker wasted weeks of his time trying to get the contracts themselves worked out.

The local CEs are typically the best part of the support machine, but we've even had problems in that regard. Even the problems we've had haven't been from bad people necessarily... typically former Compaq people trying to do work on HP hardware with no apparent training.

We gave all of our hardware support to Elite Technical Services this year. We were able to cover all of our systems for less than what we were paying HP to support half of them. ETS also gave us the option to store parts on site that we could replace ourselves. HP wouldn't even discuss that as an option. So far, I think ETS has done all right. I at least haven't heard my coworkers screaming about them. :)