Last month, I suggested that VMware could help itself and its customers by opening up. How about if it transformed completely? Could VMware survive if vSphere were free and it only charged for support? What if VMware embraced the idea that hypervisors are a commodity and focused on revenue from management and automation products? What if vSphere didn’t …
Continue reading “Make vSphere Free. Can VMware Sell Only Support?”
Support in the 21st Century. Bringing About Change. In my first post of this series, I laid out my personal opinion, based on my experience, the baseline expectations for a corporate support model and structure established at most companies. This is where I first brought up technology silos and presented the correlation between the number of technology silos and the size of the infrastructure.
Support in the 21st Century Datacenter. There is no doubt that virtualization technology has been one of the leading factors in the dramatic changes we have seen inside the 21st century datacenters. For all practical purposes the landscape in the datacenters today look a lot different than they did before the turn of the century. During this evolution that fundamentally changed the technology environment, how much has the support structure really changed to keep up with virtualization and cloud technologies? This is the topic that I would like to focus on in this multi-part post that will explore the different support structures and concepts that have been the standards. Let’s start a discussion of what just might be a better way of doing things moving forward. First, I want to establish the base line and then move on to the different thought processes and philosophies for the future.
The Public Cloud Reality around support responsibility is not something often considered, instead we are looking at SLAs, legal documents, compliance documents, and many other items. Do we consider who is ultimately responsible when something goes wrong within the cloud? Is your Cloud provider a full partner or do they limit themselves to a small subset of the implementation? Do they have 24/7 support will be covered by the SLA, but what type of support? How qualified are the clouds support teams to help you with your application’s problems? Who is responsible?
