The Quest for an MVS Solution
by Bill Rose, SSPA Founder/Executive Director

Based on the feedback I got to last week’s column, I’m even more convinced that multivendor support (MVS) is a serious issue in our industry and that calculating and evaluating the costs of MVS is far from simple. Though calculating MVS costs is complex, there are some obvious places to look when we start to analyze supporting other peoples’ products (OPPs).

For example: If you’re sending your people to training to learn other peoples’ products, you should be able to measure the costs and evaluate how much you spend on other peoples’ product support (OPPS). Take an in-depth look at your training costs and I’ll bet you’ll find that you spend a large portion of your training dollars on OPPS.

Another cost that’s probably easy to measure is the premium you pay to hire support reps that are skilled or certified on other vendors’ products. In a lot of companies, more than 50% of support professionals are probably in this category. Gone are the days when you could simply hire people and train them to support your products. Today, you need to hire people who are trained and certified, and have experience with other peoples’ products. For example, CNE or Microsoft Certified training has become a baseline for hiring in many organizations. You may also find that you need people with large database experience because if your product runs on an Oracle database, you can bet you’ll be taking some Oracle support calls. If your support staff has to maintain certification on those other products, you have yet another cost associated with OPPS.

Then there’s the cost of establishing, developing, and maintaining cooperative support agreements (CSAs). These agreements define the legal terms of engagement in the event two companies have a common customer with a support issue. The CSA often includes some kind of service level agreement (SLA) that further defines the relationship and expected response to these kinds of calls. Some members I’ve talked with have hundreds of these agreements with other vendors. Depending on the number and complexity of your CSAs, odds are pretty good that you have someone dedicated to managing these agreements and that’s another OPPS cost.

Other obvious areas to look for costs include labs. Technology companies have labs set up for a number of reasons and not all those costs are associated with OPPS. But, in a careful analysis of those labs set up and paid for by support organizations, I’d be willing to bet you could identify lab costs for dedicated hardware and software environments designed strictly to support OPPs.

Also consider the cost of software and hardware running on your support reps’ desks. For example, if your product runs on Microsoft Windows, support reps are likely to have multiple versions of Windows running on their machines to be able to replicate or see what the customer sees to be able to resolve issues. If your product runs on multiple platforms, say Windows and Linux, support reps will have both environments running at their desks or someplace nearby.

And we haven’t even started to talk about soft costs like the time support reps spend off the phone and how much of that time is spent in the pursuit of knowledge and skill to support OPPs.

When it comes to solving problems, a lot of customers will also place calls to both vendors looking for an answer effectively duplicating the industry’s effort to resolve the problem. Part of any model developed to address MVS has to put a measuring stick in place to evaluate and calculate the cost of having two vendors working independently on the same customer issue.

Given these assumptions, I’d argue that as we look more closely at the MVS activity in organizations, we’d find it affects everyone to some degree. In discussions I’ve had with vendors, everyone seems to be supporting everyone else. As you have to support OPPs, those other vendors are also spending some time supporting your products.

You could argue that some of these costs come under the cost of doing support but maybe the real question is: “If you didn’t have to support other peoples’ products, would this still be an expense? Would a portion of that cost go away?”

Rest assured, I’m not suggesting that each vendor focuses on supporting its own products. The worst thing we can do as an industry is to tell customers, “I’m sorry, we can’t help you. You’ll have to call someone else.” Customers want one-stop support and we have an obligation as we take their money for service contracts that we provide that one-stop support.

Multivendor support is a complex, complicated issue and I need your help to know what I may be missing as I try to develop a model for understanding MVS and OPP costs. If you’ve analyzed this for your organization, or taken the time to seriously think about it, I’d like to know how much you can or think you can attribute to OPPS. The model I’d like to develop and propose would also include an analysis and recommendations to help companies figure out how to collaborate effectively to communicate, analyze, and resolve customer issues quickly and save what I think is a ton of effort and money.

To start developing a model that will make MVS more efficient, I need your help. Please email me with your thoughts and experiences with MVS and supporting OPPs.

To get even information on MVS cost issues, you can download this free SSPA white paper titled, “The Real Multivendor Support Problem.”

Sincerely,


Bill Rose
SSPA Founder/Executive Director