Re: Quality of Informix Support

I would like to put in perspective the somewhat overemotional accusation directed against our German Support Mr. Michael Koehne (alias kraehe) has recently made public in comp.databases. Mr Koehne writes: > In my opinion Informix support is rotten, especialry for old > BSP customers (they tried to give good support for a bad product, > and are bankrupt now) who are now betrayed and selled by Garmhausen > und Partner. Since Mr. Koehne has such a high opinion of the support he had received from our former distributor, BSP, an opinion we - with the best will in the world - simply cannot share, we suspect he may apply rather idiosyncratic criteria to what a "good" (as against "rotten") support should look like. Having great sympathy for Mr. Koehne's problem (which we *did* recognize as a real problem from the very beginning), we are at the same time convinced that our German Support group as well as the Support of Garmhausen & Partner (our distributor, henceforward G&P) have done their best to help in solving it, though a set of exceptionally unfavourable circumstances, described below, had made this particularly difficult. Mr. Koehne writes: > I could tell a story about a bug, isql is not able to handle > german umlaute probately. They do a "stty istrip" on start > of isql and sperform, so its posible to see these umlaute, > but not to enter them. Whether our I-SQL can handle umlaute (for the uninitiated - accented characters) probately or not, we really cannot say. The fact remains that Mr. Koehne had encountered a genuine bug in the previous version of our product, which caused it to handle accented characters incorrectly under very special, indeed exceptionally rare circumstances. Mr. Koehne reported this problem to our hotline on May 4, 1994. Because of the urgency he had attached to it, we accepted it and logged it in our German caselog system, in spite of the fact that Mr. Koehne's company has no maintenance contract with us (but has one with G&P). Mr. Koehne demanded of us from the very start a "patched" version of our product, apparently ignoring (or being ignorant of) the fact that Informix is not a two-man company where the managing director also acts as the sales-cum-marketing-cum-R&D-director, possibly also as a developer spending his nights creating patches for his one and a half customers. Consequently, he didn't seem to be willing to accept that in our Support (a) a reported problem must be first thoroughly investigated as to whether it is or is not a known bug and (b) if it isn't, it must be reproducible as a problem, if possible on the same platform as the customer's; (c) we don't deliver "patches" but properly QA'd maintenance releases. On the basis of the sketchy pieces of information Mr. Koehne had delivered us at that time, we began investigating this problem the same day. In hindsight, this investigation turned out to be extremely difficult for the following reasons: (1) The problem was not identifiable as a known bug in our bug database but was in fact an epiphenomenon of another bug (as we have learnt since then from our R&D) from the description of which we could not have so much as guessed that this was indeed one and the same bug. (2) The problem, as described by Mr. Koehne, was not reproducible on our systems (the same platform as Mr. Koehne's). Hence we could not have entered it in our bug database as a newly identified problem and therefore could not escalate it to USA. (3) The detailed information we normally require of our maintenance customers was sent to us by Mr. Koehne only on May 18, i.e. with a two weeks delay. Having at last been able to set up the exact environment Mr. Koehne was working in, we were finally able to reproduce the problem and identify its cause. The whole case required 35 different and very complex actions on the part of our support engineers, a fact Mr. Koehne doesn't seem to appreciate very much. To Mr. Koehne's remark that our support (quote:) 'is only able to play a tape with "please hold the line"' we can only add that he must have repeatedly dialed the wrong number. Concurrently with Mr. Koehne (who had in between turned for help to comp.databases.informix and received an answer from our R&D) we were able to establish that the reported bug had been fixed in the version 4.12 of our product, and advised Mr. Koehne via his boss (since Mr. Koehne himself was not reachable) that he should order this update from G&P, his company's contract partner. This order was indeed placed and G&P forwarded it promptly to Informix Germany. Since then we hadn't heard from Mr. Koehne until the unfortunate e-mail quoted above. Since then we have also learnt that there has been a delay in the delivery of the said update - a circumstance completely beyond the control of our Support Department. While we have full understanding for Mr. Koehne's bitterness, we are also convinced that credit should be given where credit is due and that elementary rules of decency should prevent one from picking on the first Informix contact (in this case Support) as the scapegoat, just because it happens to be an open interface to our customers. Our German Support group has solved thousands of problems to our customers' full satisfaction. For more than one and a half years the German Technical Services, including Support, have been working under the international quality standard ISO 9002. It would be a great affront to the International Standards Organization to claim that they certify "rotten" departments. Overgeneralizing from one's own case, on top of it on the basis of incomplete and distorted information, is well known to be a self-defeating enterprise. During a recent, hour-long conversation I had with Mr. Koehne I had the impression that I was talking to a very intelligent man who, unfortunately, occasionally tends to overstate his case in highly emotional terms. I can only hope that his intelligence will prevent him from launching further unjustified, quixotic attacks against imaginary enemies. With best regards, -- +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Radovan Binar | | Manager Phone: +49-89-960 98-216 | | Technical Support Germany Fax: +49-89-960 98-203 | | INFORMIX Software GmbH E-mail: radovan@informix.com | +------------------------------------------------------------+