IBM Australia to end on-shore software support IBM’s Technology Support Services operation will “officially” end on-shore software support on June 30th in Australia and New Zealand, The Register has learned. We understand that a handful of staff have moved into other units of IBM in which they will continue to provide on-shore software support. While the number of …
You mean the rest of the world is catching up. The Internet and Globalisation, a force for good. Alas if your skills are being undercut by someone else who is also remote you must retrain.
Just think 10 years from now how much different the world will be. Look especially at India -- 2030. Or Malaysia. Turkey, lots of places. I think we are living through an amazing time.
"breach of contract"
That was my thought. Possibly those who signed the contracts for the customer are reluctant to involve their legal department on the basis that if they were to look carefully they might find a brief clause around page 288 that lets IBM do this and legal will send them back with their arse in a sling for signing such a contract.
Even in the UK, many of IBM's software products no longer have an in-country post-sales support operation (there was rumored to be a deal where each platform's technical support was aligned to just one european country. The UK only got x86 and related software packages which were immediately sold to Lenovo).
So for AIX, TSM, GPFS and a lot of other AIX specific products, you will almost certainly end up talking to someone from another country (often outside of Europe, even) for the whole duration of the problem, and trying to get someone on-site for a software problem has been almost unheard of for at least a decade! Any on-site visit for software has been regarded as paid consultancy, not post-sales support.
It was when I was getting TWS/LoadLeveler support from China (who at the time were supposed to be off the list of countries that products could be procured from) for a UK government organization that I started getting really worried.
And by support you mean confusing replies?
offsite support ussually means "I want to connect to the machine and play with it", at least in my experience, and I understand the reasons behind that, they cannot divine the problems,
Many companies and org have spent good money making sure the servers are not accesible from outside, so quite logically are unhappy with people from china connecting. Or from elsewhere.
We used to use this company, now we want nothing to do with them in any manner.
When were offered to pay top dollar to install our own spare parts (sent by a courier) on mainframes (the same money that would have had a trained tech come previously), we signed with another vendor and dropped IBM from hardware. IBM = Idiotic Business Managers
IBM’s Technology Support Services operation will “officially” end on-shore software support on June 30th in Australia and New Zealand, The Register has learned.
This is much less of a problem than it sounds. Both Australia and New Zealand are in excellent positions for chucking IBM's stuff in the ocean.
As far as 'Technical Support' TSS is dead. TSS will still exist in some guise, but not for software support. The mentioned "The Register understands, however, that IBM is working on “true follow-the-sun support model” but that for now TSS managers consider global inconsistency a “serious problem.”" at the close of the article does not contain the known position by IBM TSS management when going to press. The "“true follow-the-sun support model” is calls going direct to Level2, which means they are going to be absolutely swamped and incapable of providing any valued support. They will find it pretty much impossible to handle all Sev1 calls, getting to 'lower order' calls (S2,3,4) will be 'pot luck'. As for TSS Management seeing the potential issue as a "serious problem", well they are just about fully accountable for the situation customers now find themselves in. They rushed to hack away jobs without clearly seeing the potential implications of their actions. That is despite 'coal face' staff telling them what was likely to happen. It's sad that the workers at the bottom of the pile understand the business way better than the idiots in the 'golden chairs'
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