Providing high quality service and support for NetApp equipment is a hard business. Even the folks at NetApp admit that it is hard.
“There was nothing about this part of our business that was working,” says Rusty Walther, senior vice president of global support for NetApp. “The costs were out of control. The performance was bad. Support training was bad. There were no incentives to do well and no penalties for poor performance.”
“On a daily basis, we would get angry messages from customers telling us what a bad job our TPMs were doing,” Walther says.
NetApp decided that the best answer was to outsource its support to IBM, and it seems to work for them. Meanwhile, our business keeps growing which may mean that there are still some customers not satisfied with the OEM service and support, or the pricing models, that the NetApp IBM team is using.
I wonder how the NetApp resellers feel about having their competitor – IBM – provide service and support to their end user customers. Perhaps it doesn’t matter because NetApp has a history of nasty divorces from their partners as is evidenced by their agreements with Dell, Hitachi, Eurologic and so many others. The question to ask is: How long is this marriage going to last?
Zerowait provides outstanding support, as the reference letter below sent by an old customer to a new one shows .
We have been a Zerowait customer for approximately three years and I must say the service is second to none. We switched from NetApp to Zerowait and the differences were stark. Zerowait not only cut our costs substantially, but the talent, knowledge and willingness to assist was superior to NetApp (at least that was my experience). Don’t be suspect of Zerowait’s references as when I checked them out, the feedback was so glowing that I wondered if these were really legitimate customers. After switching, my suspicions were unfounded as I began experiencing what the others were telling me and to my surprise; the service was indeed exceptional. I have used them to go on-site, recover data from drives that was thought to be unrecoverable, training and remote technical support. If Zerowait says they can do something, you can take that to the bank. In my opinion, the switch to Zerowait is not a risk at all. I hope this answers your question.
