What do you think about IBM and Cisco deal?

addiktion

Do you think this will hurt or help us by IBM expanding its support for Cisco gear? Just curious of your thoughts.

http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/10396/53/

Kaminsky

Seems to me to be the state of the times with more and more centralised support. Take BT for example. Their main router people are based in Leeds and the engineers on the ground are typically not allowed to log into the router. Unless qualified to do so, the guys on the ground do the wiring to the demarc and then give Leeds a phone call to log into the router and sort that out. [Saying that I have come across a ccie on the ground who explained the idea to me - also let me have the old router (1603) when I told him I was studying ccna. Said if I could break the password, I could have it - romon baby!]

In Eastern Europe there is increasing consolidation of support services for the big scale stuff where the support company will hire the top quality guys on a good salary/benefits/training, and then farm out these support resources 24/7 shift work. It can prove very cost effective all round and the SLAs can be haggled to be quite strict which saves the supported companys from having all that hasstle but getting all the benefits. It was bound to happen eventually.

At the end of the day we are a support industry, there to help things run smoothly. I know it annoys a lot of my peers here when I say we are similar to a cleaner in a supermarket. When someone drops a jar of pasta sauce you get the "Cleanup on Isle 7" and the cleaner comes running and fixes the problem. We are in the same catagory to a certain extent. A support service that helps the company function.

Cucumber

The more tech support centers, the less companies willing to hire
engineers for internal support. But this is not new, it has been happening
for the last ten years.
IT as a whole has become an outsourcing service anyway,
so this IBM deal is just a step forward in that sense.

So it is bad (unless you get a job at IBM) but it has been happening, so no big deal.

Now for a personal insight.

I have seen tech support centers paying 600 dollars per month
to Cisco certified people on 3rld world countries. This support people speaks
english so they can give english-spoken support at a very cheap toll.

Now getting 600 bucks per month might be OK for a 3rd World country
but that severely damages the economics of certified people on other
countries. I would be more concerned about these 3rd world Cisco support
centers than the IBM deal. Nevertheless this is how economics work.