Vendors Are Listening

Posted on June 19, 2013 by Matthew Norwood
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There isn’t a day that goes by where someone on Twitter isn’t complaining about some vendor. I do it myself. Sometimes it seems as if we are all shouting about the same thing and nothing is ever done about it. While the smaller vendors tend to be open to honest feedback, you wonder if the larger ones even care.

Let me frame the discussion. Back in April I was upset, again, at having to jump through hoops to get Cisco TAC to open a support case on a piece of hardware that was covered under a maintenance contract, but which I was not entitled to. For those that don’t know, even if a particular piece of equipment is covered, you cannot open support cases if that particular contract is not associated with your cisco.com user profile.

For your average corporate end user, this isn’t as much of a problem as it is for those of us who work for Cisco partners and deal with a variety of clients. There are plenty of instances in which I happen to be lending a hand with a client that my company did not sell the Cisco SmartNet maintenance contract to. Some other reseller did, so my account is not entitled to that particular contract. In order to fix that, the customer has to authorize the attachment of the contract to my profile with Cisco. Then, I can open up support cases on any of the hardware covered under that contract. The problem with that approach is that I don’t always have the luxury of waiting for that process to work itself out. Consider a network outage that crops up and the client expects my company to drive the issue with Cisco TAC. While the outage is ongoing, I am having to plead with Cisco to get my account authorized to simply open the case. This is something that tends to happen on a fairly regular basis. Thus, the following tweet was spawned:

 

 

Not long after that, I was contacted via Twitter by Cisco. They wanted to forward my contact information to someone within Cisco that worked in the SmartNet arena. I provided my info and a phone call was setup.

I was able to talk to someone who manages SmartNet and explain my issues. I mentioned the following:

1. Why do I need entitlement on my cisco.com profile to open a support case on a device that is covered by an active maintenance contract? Other vendors do not have this restriction. Once a serial number is provided to the vendor and support coverage is verified, the case is opened. No questions asked. As a Cisco partner/reseller, I am in and out of accounts that I may not have done much work for in the past. It is frustrating for the customer as well as for the partner since support cannot be rendered until the administrative access piece is worked out. This causes delays during outages that cost companies money.

2. Why is it so hard for end customers to determine what devices are covered and when that support contract expires? SmartNet renewals are always a painful process. It is even worse when multiple resellers are used to purchase hardware and software from Cisco. Other vendors provide this information to customers with relative ease. By being able to quickly identify support status, the renewal process is a lot less painful and support can be continued with a lot fewer delays. If the customer happens to use the Smart Care service, they can get this information via a web portal. There is a hardware appliance on their local network that goes out and discovers their Cisco devices and is able to provide them with a report showing coverage levels and expiration dates. This service isn’t meant for large customers though.

I was able to have an open and frank discussion with someone at Cisco regarding these 2 issues. Some possible solutions were suggested by Cisco about how to deal with these problems. I also mentioned to them that I understood that a company as large as Cisco cannot just make changes to the entire program as quickly as a smaller vendor that only serves a fraction of the customers that Cisco does.

I don’t know if or when these issues will be solved. I can tell you that after having that phone call, I have a lot more hope that they will be fixed sometime in the future. It is important to acknowledge that vendors like Cisco are listening. They could have very easily ignored my complaint and I thank them for taking the time to at least hear my concerns and look at ways to fix the issues.

Closing Thoughts

Social media has given the average person a voice that didn’t really exist in years past. If you complain about something, whether tactful or not(I was probably a bit negative with my tweet.), and the vendor engages you, take the time to talk with them. You never know what can happen.

Have you experienced similar results as a result of voicing a concern with a vendor? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear about it and see who is and who isn’t trying to make things better for you.

Posted in cisco, vendors | 1 Comment

This Job Isn’t For Everyone

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Matthew Norwood
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The longer I spend on the value added reseller(VAR) side of the house, the more I realize this job isn’t for everyone. If you stop and think about it, it can be downright depressing at times due to the following reasons:

1. Your schedule is dictated by the clients. This very rarely will align with your own plans of how your week should go. They’re paying for engineering services and that means you have to meet their timelines and their outage windows. Sometimes that is late at night in the middle of the week. Sometimes that means working on the weekend. Most people in IT are used to some odd hours. It’s kind of hard to make changes to a network when the users are on it. However, when you have to work for multiple clients, your schedule can very easily be consumed by late nights and weekends.

2. Travel can be exhausting. Planes, cars, hotel rooms, and lots of meals in restaurants. Quite often, you’re eating alone and skimming e-mail or processing an implementation plan in your head while you consume the same bland food you have eaten at a dozen or so other locations.

3. You very rarely get to focus 100% on something. There are always other projects in the mix. Whether it is a pre-sales deliverable(The very large VARs separate the pre and post sales aspect.), or just a client that you need to follow up with on a past or future project, you always have to juggle multiple clients.

4. You manage clients and vendors. Sometimes the two are in sync and this isn’t a problem, but often, the client has certain expectations, and the vendor has a different set of expectations.

5. Everybody is in sales. I’m an engineer. I am not a sales person. However, plenty of times a client will ask about a particular product or vendor that has nothing to do with the project I am currently working with them on. I need to be familiar with all the vendors we sell for and be able to at least get the ball rolling when asked about those things. You’d be surprised how much extra business can come about just by listening to what the client is asking and getting the right people from your company involved. That’s where the “value” in value added reseller comes into play.

6. You can’t avoid the politics. As much as I would rather not get involved in corporate and vendor politics, it is unavoidable. My cardinal rule, to quote Patrick Swayze from Road House, is to “be nice”. I’m human, so I have my days when I am grumpy or curt with answers, but generally try to be accommodating when it comes to working well with others. I have friends at most of the other local VARs and vendors, and friendships come before any logo I wear on my shirt. There are tactful ways to disagree with competition without having to trash them. I also try not to pick sides when it comes to the politics within a corporate environment. I’m there to perform a specific function and not get involved with their own internal issues. There are times when the local IT staff at the company you are working with don’t want you there. Maybe they feel threatened by your presence, or maybe they happen to be more capable than you and feel like you are a waste of money. I can assure you that I have no desire to take some person’s corporate IT job at all. That’s not what I am there for. I am also very aware that I am often not the smartest person in the room. Plenty of times, I am there just to work on a project that the internal IT staff doesn’t have the manpower to get done. I’ve mentioned to people numerous times that they’ll probably never see me again after the project is done. I find that helps to break the ice with them once they realize I have no interest in working them out of a job.

7. Sometimes you don’t know the answer. There are times when you ride in on your horse and save the day. There are also times when you get pulled into a problem or project and you get in over your head. As long as you are willing to say “I don’t know”, it tends to work out for the best. Having an internal group of good engineers that you can bounce ideas off of or ask questions, is a great thing to have. I leverage my co-workers plenty of times. I also leverage the vendors since they tend to know far more about their products than I do.

8. You won’t win every deal. Sometimes you spend hours and days putting solutions together and the sale doesn’t happen. That’s life. You can’t win them all. I like interesting projects. There are quite a few of them in the past few years that I was really excited about, but we just didn’t get the business from the client on that deal.

9. You have to keep track of your time. On the engineering side, my company doesn’t get paid if I am sitting at home playing video games. They make money when I am doing billable work. I have to keep track of how much work I have done for various clients and report that in a timely manner. If I don’t, we can’t bill for it. If we can’t bill for it, or the billing is delayed because I failed to keep track of my time, that’s revenue that cannot be accounted for.

10. You have no network of your own. That sounds weird, but if you have spent any time on the corporate side, you have a network of your own to work on. You get familiar with it. You know where all the bodies are buried, so to speak. You become attached to it. At least, I did when I was on the corporate side of the house. I don’t have a network of my own working for a VAR. Also, because you have no network of your own, what a client chooses to do on theirs really isn’t your concern. You can give advice, but understand that a lot of times, you just have to bite your tongue and do what they ask, even if you don’t agree.

Enough Negativity
I’m laying out the negatives, because I think anyone who is considering working for a VAR needs to go into it with their eyes wide open. Let me tell you the positives, because I think they outweigh the negatives.

1. You get to see some cool stuff. I’ve been in plenty of environments where I thought the people there were lucky to have that job. Whether it is the type of work they do as a company, or just the sheer amount of hardware they get to work on, I am often amazed at the type of work companies are doing and the type of equipment they are using to get it done. I love to come home and tell my kids that I got to work with a company whose name they recognize or with some system that did something really neat. Factories, trucking companies, hospitals, entertainment venues, schools, etc. All of them have interesting things going on, and for a little while, I get to experience that. I’ve also traveled a fair amount to places that I probably wouldn’t go to in another job. There are some exceptions with corporate and vendor gigs, but as a whole, you’ll see more as a reseller.

2. Experience. Any IT job is going to give you experience. On the VAR side, you’ll get to see it from a whole different perspective. How often do you swap your core switches or upgrade your wireless network in a corporate environment? We do it all the time on the VAR side. That means you’ll get to see a lot of installations and upgrades over the course of a few years that someone in a corporate environment might only see a few times in their career. You’ll get a lot more “scars” faster. You’ll also learn what works and what doesn’t because of those “scars”.

3. Freedom. I don’t sit in a cubicle. I work from home when I can. On any given day, I might go to a handful of different places and meet with a bunch of different people. There are times when I am on site with a client for a week or a month and sit in a cubicle to perform work, but that is not the norm. I don’t have to fight rush hour traffic regularly either. I can get more accomplished in a t-shirt and shorts with some VPN credentials working out of my home office than if I were to fight traffic for 2 or more hours a day getting to and from an office.

4. Networking. You meet lots of people. Lots of them. For all the people that are active in social media on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, there are many more who aren’t. The only way you meet those people is to go see them at their place of work. I get to do that regularly. While I always try to evangelize when it comes to the awesome technical resource that is Twitter, not everyone wants to do that. There are plenty of smart people you will never meet unless you happen to work at the same company with them. Being able to work with a lot of different companies allows me to do just that.

5. Industry perspective. Working with vendors as a reseller is a bit different than on the corporate side. It’s just a different relationship. I would say it is a more open and honest relationship. It’s not that the vendors are out there lying to customers. It’s just that they shield you from a lot of the sales-type discussions that go on. It is fascinating to me to listen to vendors and VARs strategize on how to make the sale. For the record, my experience has not been one of “salespeople are liars and looking to trick you into buying something”. From the VAR perspective, it’s quite the opposite. If you burn a client to make a sale, it will probably be your last one with them. Plus, clients talk to each other. Bad news travels fast.

Closing Thoughts

Like I said in the title, this job isn’t for everyone. Some people have spent time in the VAR space and didn’t like it. Others have made a career out of being on the VAR side and won’t ever do anything else because they would miss it too much. If you like variety and a good challenge, it just might be a good career move for you. It can also be a good launching pad into the vendor space. It’s a good middle ground between the corporate side and the vendor side.

For a lot of people, they like the continuity and stability of a corporate job. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all. For others, they prefer working for a vendor. That’s a different set of challenges, and since I have never worked for a vendor, I wouldn’t be able to speak in an educated manner about that side of the house. Whatever your preference, as long as you are aware of the pros and cons, you can make the best decision for you. If you have thought about making the leap over to a VAR, make sure you talk to several different people who live in that world and ask for honest feedback before taking the plunge. It can be very rewarding career-wise. I definitely don’t regret it. I’m happy to have a conversation in person(location permitting) or via phone, e-mail, Twitter, etc or can point you to some other people that do this kind of work for a different perspective.

I also want to point out that a few of my Internet friends have started an IT career focused site here: http://thetechinterview.com that has some REALLY good content.

For some additional VAR reading, see the following posts:

http://packetpushers.net/thoughts-on-working-as-a-consultant-for-a-var/

http://www.network-janitor.net/2013/02/the-var-y-good-upsides-to-being-a-consultant/

Posted in career | 9 Comments

Shelfware

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Matthew Norwood
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ShelfIf you hang around various IT departments long enough, you are bound to run into “shelfware“. That’s the term used to describe software that is purchased, but is either never used, or used for a brief period and then forgotten. Ask yourself this. Why would a company spend money on software and never use it? The answer can vary, but in my experience, it generally happens because the IT staff is too busy to give it the proper attention it needs.

Let’s face it. Your average corporate IT staff is overworked and understaffed. There is always more work than there are bodies to cover the workload. In my opinion, that’s the main reason so many IT people move between companies on a fairly regular basis. Burnout.

Then, there’s the problem of finding qualified people to perform the work. Maybe it is due to companies not wanting to invest in training their people or maybe demand is greater than the supply of talent out there.

One of the major pain points I have noticed in the past several years has been visibility within the network and the systems and applications that run on it. This is not as big a problem in larger environments where the IT staff and budgets are at a decent level. In the small and medium environments, visibility tends to be poor.

Why Is Visibility Needed?

Networks are infinitely more complex these days. I remember when I first got involved with IT in the mid-90′s. Everything was simplified when compared to today. An application was typically tied to a couple of servers and all the end users had some local piece of software installed that interfaced with these servers. Web services were in their infancy.

Fast forward to 2013. Web based applications dominate most of the environments I do work in. These applications are typically multi-tiered where a web server talks to application servers, and those application servers talk to a bunch of database servers. Load balancers are sending client requests to servers based on any number of factors. Complexity always seems to be going up and never down.

If you get into an environment with limited visibility into the network and applications, it isn’t a pretty sight when things stop working. Conference calls and meetings are spun up and everyone scurries about checking their various areas of responsibility to try and find the culprit.

APM To The Rescue!

Application Performance Management has become essential for so many networks out there in recent years. It isn’t enough to know if all your servers are up and running. The days of pinging a box and marking it as good are over. Often times, there are numerous things that have to be checked on each server, be it web, application, or database, just to determine whether or not it is healthy and can serve clients. The APM systems out there that give you insight into the problem cause can be equally as complex as the application you are trying to monitor.

Let’s say that you run a simplified APM system like ExtraHop, which I wrote about here, that doesn’t require software agents on servers and uses packet captures to determine application health. You still have to have someone who can look at the data it presents and interpret that correctly to solve the problem.

Maybe your company has someone or a group who has the sole task of managing the various monitoring systems. I was in one of those environments several years ago, and that person was a very valuable resource. What if you don’t have that person or persons dedicated to watching monitoring systems? What then? That’s where software tends to end up as shelfware. It’s running. It’s watching various things, but generally only gets looked at when there is a problem. When there is a problem, hopefully you have someone on the IT staff that knows enough about your applications to make an intelligent guess as to what the problem is. If you don’t, there is an alternative.

Introducing Atlas Services

While at the Interop Las Vegas show in May of this year, I spent some time talking with ExtraHop about their Atlas service. I work for an ExtraHop reseller and wanted to learn more about this particular offering.

In an effort to take some of the difficulty out of APM, ExtraHop offers a managed service called Atlas. The concept is pretty simple. You drop in one or more ExtraHop appliances(physical or virtual), feed it the appropriate network data and they take care of the rest. In a non-Atlas deployment, you have the same appliances(all commodity Dell hardware for the physical boxes), but are left to your own to configure it and interpret the data.

With Atlas, engineers at ExtraHop review the data they capture from your network and build reports showing you where actual problems are. The longer they perform this service for customers, the more data they have to make even better recommendations as to how your network or systems should be configured. I liken this to security vendors that get data from their customer base and use it to create better signatures or methods to prevent exploits from bypassing their hardware and software. At some point, ExtraHop might be able to automate this process because they have seen a particular issue show up thousands or millions of times.

Here is a sample report from Atlas:

The link to the actual report is here.

What’s The Value?

There are a few things I can think of where a managed APM service like this helps.

First, you don’t necessarily have to employ an APM dedicated resource. They can use their expertise to provide you a level of knowledge and service as if you had someone who solely focused on APM on staff. This moves you closer to being proactive as opposed to reactive.

Second, it frees up your overworked IT staff to focus on other things. A lot of times when I am doing work for a client in a consultant capacity, it isn’t because I am more capable than the in house IT staff. It is because they have too much to do and just need to offload some work to a third party.

Closing Thoughts

APM is not easy. Implementation can be difficult and being able to get the maximum value out of the product tends to be a challenge without a dedicated resource tending to it. The Atlas service from ExtraHop is an attempt to take the headache out of APM. Their product is already easy to use without the Atlas Service:

Shelfware as a whole is probably not going to go away. However, with an offering like Atlas from ExtraHop, there is no need for your APM solution to not give you as much value as it can and end up collecting dust.

You can check out more about ExtraHop at www.extrahop.com.

Posted in extrahop, monitoring, network management | Leave a comment