Vendor engagement and real world opportunities

Got this by email from ‘Chris’ who I tend to see more regularly since I relocated to Canary Wharf (East London) outside of the City.  Chris has been tasked with deploying this application from a vendor with tight deadlines, his email goes on in quite some detail as to how he has been wronged and unfortunately mentions them several times, needless to say we don’t name names here when being negative, so I’ve abstracted the best bits and summarized below.

• They vendor has no concept of standards – it’s written for Windows 2003 32 bit, what about 64bit or Windows 2008? That requires sign off internally as I am not allowed to deploy Windows 2003 32bit servers.
• There is no concept of a service account – a what, no we just log in and install using Nigel’s account and then run as local system – service accounts are mandatory when implementing in production.
• The application is not supported on SAN, needs to be RAID 5 – how and why was it designed like this and as an application how would it know?
• The application has been signed off for use on these three types of rack servers – but we don’t buy from either vendor, so does that mean it won’t work on my server even though the specs are identical?
• The application is supported on virtual servers with a range of strange requirements – SAN storage support issues, cpu GHz specific ratings etc

Needless to say that Chris has been rather busy and will not be sending them a Christmas card.  He was supplied with a biscuit and a cup of tea in my attempt to reboot him.  Vendors are offering a service which is based on a set of standards which they have ratified against, that said it would be nice if they could have what I would call the standard and the enterprise offering.

• The standard offering would be the all rules concept, it only works on a DL380 G7 with 48GB of RAM with 2 Xeon Processors and disks plugged in by an engineer called Gary.
• The enterprise offering would be more fluid and concept based. The application requires a 2 socket industry standard server with 48GB RAM with SAN Storage. RAID settings, spindle types and everything else should not come into it. Of course the ultra low latency or platform/role specific applications might have such requirements but when it comes to something a bit more atypical, being this specific and what could be perceived as being disengaged could so be perceived as being unhelpful.

We need to appreciate that you cannot please everyone, but those little efforts go a long way. Simple things like responses to typical questions make the onboarding activities smoother and reduce time to deployments, is it cluster aware, can the application be installed on the shared drive and not the OS drive, can we use service accounts and what level of access does it need, what would you recommend and what is deployed in the real world.

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