Episode Summary

iland Director of Cloud Market Intelligence Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Christopher Kusek, Jim Jones, and Mike Nelson for a conversation about the concerns customers have with support in the cloud. They discuss how to evaluate your providers’ support, the importance of support documentation vs. human support channels, and when customers should be looking for a more white-glove approach. If you are testing support when there’s a problem, there’s a problem.

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[03:06] How would you recommend customers evaluate providers’ support? Could it be as simple as utilizing a free trial or PoC and opening test support cases?

Topic 2

[12:57] As a customer, what is more important: An extensive and detailed wiki or a robust set of support channels (phone, chat, email, etc.) that would link you directly to a human?

Topic 3

[21:30] All support organizations will address break/fix issues, but some give a more white-glove approach and will provide advice and answer generic questions. When should a customer focus on providers with the latter?

Cloud Bites

[04:02] “I’d say it really comes down to identifying and establishing your real use cases and problems, and your requirements, the scenarios you’re actually going to be in.” — Christopher Kusek 

[07:07] “Folks who have worked in the data center, and have worked with their own support people, and who have worked with these other vendors, they’re not getting the same experience with cloud vendors.” — Mike Nelson 

[12:34] “It’s not what they do when things go right, it’s what they do when things go wrong.” — Christopher Kusek

[13:56] “One of my pet peeves in life actually is when organizations bury that basic support information behind a login, to where you have to know what the login is before you can even get to a KB article or see version histories.” — Jim Jones

[17:20] “Have you ever been able to call anyone at Google, or AWS, or Microsoft, besides not paying a fortune for premium support or anything like that?” — Mike Nelson

[20:59] “That’s an important part of a good support org as well, is being able to get that information out.” — Jim Jones

[24:34] “When you have a support person on the end of the line that says, ‘Hey, I’m here to help you, we’re going to get this thing done and I’m going to be with it, with you from step one all the way to step 256, or whatever it is.’ That is what you’re really looking for from a customer’s perspective, in my opinion.” — Mike Nelson

[25:04] “I have seen some white glove cloud services that have left me saying, ‘Oh, that’s actually good.’ And that’s a very rare thing.” — Christopher Kusek

[28:39] “Finding that coalescing support organization that can say, ‘OK, all these things under this umbrella, we are in a very good situation with being able to help and to get you over that hump.’” — Jim Jones 

[31:47] “A lot of people say that the cloud is cheap, but they’re rarely actually including in those support costs.” — Christopher Kusek