Re: More on Oracle Support

From: Alex Gorbachev <ag_at_oracloid.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2008 08:17:55 -0400
Message-Id: <029853B5-3B08-4618-95E3-2054601DFE99@oracloid.com>


Agree.

I had experience improved service (Advanced Product Support - is that the same as Premium Support) with one of my past companies buy boy it costs you leg and an arm... unless you have special negotiated conditions. ;-) Many biggies do.
It does give you easy access to very good engineers and shortens the bridge to development. It might actually pay off for some customers with especially critical requirements.

However, the idea behind Premium support is the same - even though, you have a somewhat dedicated group of engineers, the primary benefit of such support is access to Oracle *internal* resources and knowledge base. There are very few who can compete with this model and they would usually be ex-Oracle. Don't get me wrong - I'm of very high opinion about about engineers I dealt with but the price for this engineering resources was very high. If you know how to push the right buttons and is a relatively large Oracle customer, you can obtain many of the benefits with standard support.

Don't get me wrong - easy access to internal resources (indirectly), Oracle development and advanced engineers is great and gives you lot of leverage.

It's all IMHO - I would love to hear others' experience with advanced levels of Oracle support.

On 4-Apr-08, at 7:49 AM, Mercadante, Thomas F (LABOR) wrote:

> "Premier Support". Nice. Just another revenue stream for Oracle.
>
> PT Barnum was right.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
> [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Andrey Kriushin
> Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 7:22 AM
> To: ag_at_oracloid.com
> Cc: wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu; oracle-l_at_freelists.org
> Subject: Re: More on Oracle Support
>
>
> Hi,
>
> completely support what Alex have said. Being a part of the support
> team
> in First-Line Support Center here in Russia, I know and practically
> use
> those "tricks & techniques" on a day-to-day basis when talking to
> Global
> Support.
>
> Moreover, I got almost the same recommendations from Oracle
> tech.support
> managers. One thing to add:
> there is a thing, which is called "Premier Support". For some amount
> of
> money all your SR's would have a privilege in processing - i.e. more
> adequate engineer from the beginning, easy escalation etc. Also for
> planned upgrades etc, if you inform the support team beforehand,
> you'll
> have right persons "on shift" all around the globe.
>
> Oh well... Try also to chose SR opening time when an 8-hour shifts are
> in USA or Europe... I.e. don't open SR's in the night (for us in
> Russia
> that is vice versa ;-)). Then even without Premier Support the
> chances
> to get the right person from "that side" are higher :-)
>
> -- Andrey
> PS. And yes - techies do not like to speak to management as a whole
> and
> to external managers especially :-).
>
> Alex Gorbachev wrote:
>> Well, the model of Oracle Support is flown in principle. You pay
>> pre-defined amount of support fees per year and the less they do for
>> you, the better the business. If there is competitive service
>> available - such approach could benefit only in very short term. But
>> you can't simply change support vendor - you do need updates and
>> access to support in some cases so you can't change them to another
>> competitive provider. Unless you are willing to change to another
>> database but I'm not sure if support from other DB vendors is better.
>>
>> This is why existence of strong user communities, such as Oracle-L,
>> is
>
>> great. If you need more than community support, there are other
>> service providers that can apply more intensive therapy to your
>> Oracle
>
>> databases and, perhaps, provide special skills to deal with Oracle
>> Support. You can call it advanced support if you wish.
>>
>> But I digress... Practical advise would be to request formal
>> requirements without guidance to a specific firewall implementation.
>> You should feel free to call Oracle support and request to speak to
>> manager on duty and inform him about this concern and how important
>> this case for your company and how many millions you are loosing and
>> etc. I noticed that often DBA's are not comfortable in such
>> conversation and management involvement (you would need somewhat
>> pushy
>> approach) provides good results. There is no need to know technical
>> details -- just need to emphasize importance and ask to escalate.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Alex
>
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>
>
>
>
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> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>

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Received on Fri Apr 04 2008 - 07:17:55 CDT

Original text of this message