[ILUG-BOM] Re: Pitching Linux to corporates?

[jtd]

On Sunday 24 September 2006 00:49, Vivek J. Patankar wrote:
> 20 mails on this subject and nobody has mentioned one of the main
> factors major corporates care most about.
> I'm talking about the "Who's responsible for an f-up?" or "Passing
> the buck." factor.

THE IT DEPARTMENT. U dont pay the IT manager to sit on his ass and 
point fingers. U pay him cause he has the knowledge and ability to 
solve a problem. If your systems does not confirm to your SLA u sack 
him. 
For accountability how about toting up th downtimes. All M$ shop IT 
managers would be selling vadas at dadar by now. Only that top 
management knows zero about technology on which they are betting 
share holders money.

> A common scenario would be something like this. A server running
> Windows 2003 fails due to a problem with the OS. The business owner
> of the server screams at the IT Manager, who inturn screams at the
> techs. The techs promply point a finger at Microsoft who is ever
> willing to bend over, take it up the tailpipe and provide a
> solution/workaround ASAP, ie. if the company is a "Gold" customer.

ASAP whats that. Pleeease give me an SLA with fix problem ASAP clause 
overiding all others - O God (no not RMS) where are u.
> I have seen this happen, and I believe that this is a common
> occurance as most major corporates end up being Gold customers of
> Microsoft.

Read the SLAs - carefully.

> And this is not just with Microsoft, a recent incident that I came
> across proved this.
>
> A certain corporate has a very large mail setup, several servers
> hosting thousands of POP mailboxes. The OS used here was RH7.3 or
> RH9. A decision is taken to cut down the number of servers that
> mailboxes reside on to two. The hardware selected was powerful
> intel based hardware from Sun. 

Intel ...powerful - kinda out of sync the two.

> The OS of choice was Centos 4.0 
> because it was recommended by the vendor who supported the mail
> servers. A hardware related hiccup caused the corporate to refer
> the matter to Sun who promply refused to provide support. The
> reason cited for the refusal was that the boxes were certified for
> RHEL and not Centos, so Sun wouldn't be responsible for problems.
> After being stung by something like this, 

Get the IT manager or whoever drew up the SLA and signed it.

> the business side decided 
> that the servers are to be migrated to Solaris, and any software
> distributed with an open source license, 

Tell business to define in lay language what they want and stop 
interfering in Tech thay have no clue about after all IT does not 
tell them whom or on what terms they should do business with. This is 
the exact words i used in a meeting last month. Result - uproar and 
words abt ownership and responsibility etc. Which was exactly the 
point. So if u are wise u will purchase hardware, software and 
maintanence from one entity with u owe us your life clause.

>
> No matter how much we stress of the benefits of Linux instead of
> Windows, the question of accountability for problems with the
> software and who is going to fix it will always be a stumbling
> block. 

M$ accountability - read the licence. U are better off throwing your 
money outa the window. Scrambling every third day, staying awake 
until 3 in the morn and playing hero is not my idea of 
responsibility. It means u have a very bad IT dept.

> Agreed that GNU/Linux distributions have much lesser 
> problems than the competitor, but the corporates want someone to
> turn to or someone to blame for the problems they face, and that
> *someone* should be able to fix the problem or provide a workaround
> promptly. Microsoft seems to be doing that pretty well.

Strange. That u require something known as antivirus for papering 
holes bigger than the backdoors. The corporate IT honchos need a 
brain transplant pronto.

> Any comments on this case?

The wrong conclusion derived from wrong logic.
 Badly defined vendor roles somehow twisted to show that GNU software 
is bad cause the IT guy wants to point fingers to cover his 
incompetence.
And since GNU software does not permit such pointless combo of 
requirements it wont do well. So inorder to do "well" (allow sundry 
characters to make money and yet other sundry characters to cover 
incompetence while paying money) GNU software vendors must do 
business in a way that allows such cases especially since such cases 
are widespread.

While a solution exists for such cases, it is not what u seem to 
suggest at all. And the casualty will be the IT dept. incumbent.

-- 
Rgds
JTD