Who's at your service? - computer service providers supporting heterogeneous networks - includes related articles on the challenges of product diversity in client/server environments, supporting the Internet, and negotiating a service agreement - Industry Trend or Event

Early this year, employees of Lockheed Martin ran into problems whenever they tried to gain network access to product marketing information stored at the company's Loral Corp. division in Anaheim, Calif. Todd Thompson, manager of IT implementation for the electronic components division, dispatched three IS staffers to determine the cause of the disconnects and abends plaguing the network. But the problem eluded the technicians, in spite of their use of high-end analyzers, network monitors and the expert advice of numerous other in-house IS staffers.

Everyone involved was baffled by the fact that the disconnects happened more frequently over longer distances and at peak use times. "None of our network tools could point to the correlation of those sets of circumstances that had to occur to create this problem," Thompson says. Three weeks later, they isolated the problem to a new TCP/IP gateway and stack running as an NLM (NetWare Loadable Module) on a Novell server in Anaheim. It seems the gateway hung up when faced with specific products and conditions -- in this case, whenever a particular frame-relay WAN tried to access a Sybase database during high network traffic over great distances. The problem happened more frequently when the client used was 486- or Pentium-based PC running Microsoft Windows.

Time to make the dreaded service call. "You have to prove your technical competency to the vendor or they will send you on some form of wild goose chase. The vendor will want to do the same 10 days of tests you just did. You could be talking months before [the problem] could be resolved," says Thompson. "We assured the vendor that we had done our due diligence and that it was a vendor problem. It turned out several others were having the same problem." Thompson was lucky. Two weeks after reporting the glitch he had a temporary patch in place, followed by a permanent solution four months later. Total time for a true fix: six months.

Today, the average client/server site runs 12 operating systems, nine databases and 17 development tools. This computing diversification has been increasing for three years and will continue to do so, according to a 1996 survey by Sentry Market Research (SMR), Westborough, Mass. No wonder respondents to a 1996 software market survey by International Data Corp. (IDC), Framingham, Mass., rated service and support second only to features and functionality as important requirements when considering software purchases.

In multivendor environments, the sheer number of service contracts alone is enough to give IS managers migraines. When they do make a vendor service call, the vendor may try to pass the buck. "When you start talking multiple vendors and something goes wrong, the first thing you run into is a lot of finger pointing," says Padgett Peterson, a security expert and a senior staff member of information security engineering at Lockheed Martin. Finger pointing is typical when the problem is difficult to pin down or when there's more than one application involved. "The way the computing environment has evolved, it's more and more difficult to discern where the problem lies," says Helen Dragoon, senior analyst at IDC.

Therefore, IS managers are doing everything they can to avoid calling vendors for service. "Organizations are not really looking to vendors for service anymore," says Colleen McCormick, analyst in the information services department at Gartner Group, a Stamford, Conn., research firm. When they do look to the vendors, she says, they often find that "vendors are outsourcing their support. Help desk and support services are exploding." Indeed, the help desk tool market is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 30%, and is expected to reach $1 billion in 1997, according to Bill Keyworth, Gartner's research director for platforms and operation software.

To its advantage, the $30 billion Lockheed Martin has enough pull to circumvent some of the more standard support avenues when seeking service. For example, when IS managers must call a vendor directly -- something that only happens in 7% of incidents -- they have enough clout to bypass vendor help desks and go directly to the product engineers for help. After all, the Bethesda, Md.-headquartered defense contractor manages more than 1,000 LANs and 95,000 systems users, and employs some 1,000 system administrators, help desk staff, IS managers and other technical talent to manage its computing labyrinth. Every major application on the market today runs somewhere within the 190,000 employee corporation, as do 30 different server platforms, 100 types of end-user desktops and 20 different network operating environments.

However, most companies lack the financial and technical resources to raise an IS army such as Lockheed's. Instead, many IS managers are outsourcing part or all of their service needs. "Outsourcing on the whole is on the rise and a wildly growing business," says Sam Kapreilian, vice president of marketing for Metrix Inc., Waukesha, Wisc., a maker of service management software. "People are saying, `We know how to make Dixie cups cost-effectively, but we're not in the IT business,' so they make a strategic decision to outsource that part of their business."

This trend has just about everybody in the technology business trying to get in on what IDC says is a $35 billion worldwide technical services market. Third-party service provides are ramping up, consolidating and increasing the number of products they support in an effort to make themselves "one-stop" service shops. IBM, Sun Microsystems and others are going into the service business by adding multiple product service options for their larger customers. And resellers such as Vanstar Corp., Pleasanton, Calif., and Entex Information Services Inc., Rye Brook, N.Y., are following suit. Indeed, Gartner says the third-party service market has been growing 40% annually since the group began tracking it in 1987.

For its part, DecisionOne Corp., ranked by Westborough, Mass.-based Dataquest as the largest third-party multivendor service provider in the U.S., has been buying up other service vendors and their expertise for a couple of years. Handling 225,000 calls per month, the $7000 million DecisionOne, based in Frazer, Pa., says it supports more than 150 shrink-wrapped software products and 15,000 hardware products. A large part of DecisionOne's business comes from backline support to resellers and OEMs, who in turn wrap this support into service contracts they provide to their customers.

"We've developed relationships with companies that are multivendor in nature, such as DecisionOne, to use with our expertise in Unix and Sun products," says Scott Shimomura, product manager for SunService, the service and support arm of Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, Calif. SunService also develops backline support directly with vendors of products typically used in a Sun environment such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix, SAP, Computer Associates, Tivoli and Lotus. According to Shimomura, the only point of contact a customer makes is with the SunService center.

Do these one-stop service shops fill the need for multiproduct service and support? Not yet.

"Nobody's happy with the kind of support they're getting on the PC side. And, for the high-end services, there's a big demand for a certain level of expertise in the marketplace," says Doug Chandler, senior analyst at IDC. "That demand is outstripping the supply." Adds Dataquest Senior Analyst Eric Rocco, "Multivendor service providers don't have the product expertise and don't understand the mix in [customer] environments. A service company that's typically strong in, say, PC maintenance, might not be as strong in networking and midrange systems."

Therefore, some IS managers are turning to several third-party service vendors, says Chandler. "If you literally have one source of support, that company can get lazy without any competition. Many IS people prefer to have two or three providers taking different parts of the support maintenance," he explains.

Furthermore, while outside service vendors offer a single point of contact, what goes on behind the scenes may not seem particularly efficient. In fact, in some cases involving third-party vendors, problem resolution time has increased. In more complex problems, for example, numerous backline support calls bog down the process. Say an end user calls the in-house help desk. When that doesn't work, the IS manager calls the help desk at the outside service provider with whom they have contracted. The service provider then calls its backline support group, which makes several calls to the vendors involved. The problem is passed around as these groups try to simulate the conditions in which the problem occurred until they reach a resolution.

Says SunService's Shimomura, "There's some confusion out there when it comes to the enterprise-wide customer. The enterprise customer wants the mainframe model of support where they have one vendor they can call for everything. Currently, that is not available from most of the major vendors out there because of third-party software, databases and network management software that prevents one vendor from having the level of expertise they need. Throw in third-party hardware and that only adds to the problem."

What about cost? Does consolidating service save an IS department money? Yes -- and no. Consolidating service certainly reduces administrative costs because there are fewer service contracts to manage and, in some cases, fewer in-house IS people. But costs for service aren't going down. According to Gartner's McCormick, since 1987 service costs for application software and operating systems, for example, have held steady at 15% to 17% of total cost of ownership. "The costs are going up in regards to technical support requirements; more is being spent on tools, training and the help desk. But the absolute costs per call for users of these outsourcers haven't really gone up," she says.

At the moment, there seems to be no clear solution to the service problems associated with heterogeneous computing environments. Customer satisfaction for multivendor service providers is still an issue -- according to a Dataquest survey, 13% of respondents felt they would be sacrificing service quality by opting for a third-party service vendor.

Neither will the heterogeneous computing environment go away. SMR predicts that, by the end of the average client/server site will include 13 operating systems, 10 databases and 19 development tools. To provide the support demanded by IS managers for such complex environments, software vendors will need to refine their services and manage rising numbers of backline support vendors. Says Gartner's Chandler, "With more complex technology, tools and systems needing to work together, the service industry has a long way to go before it becomes seamless."

RELATED ARTICLE: HETEROGENEITY: A MIXED BLESSING

The ability to run a combination of operating systems, databases, tools and other software gives organizations the freedom to choose the computing solutions best-suited to their business needs. According to a recent SMR survey of IT managers in large corporations, product diversity in client/server environments will continue to increase. However, such heterogeneity also brings management problems in many forms. It may be difficult, for example, to pinpoint where the fault lies -- and who to call for support -- when a system goes down. Furthermore, the number of service contracts associated with multivendor environments can be overwhelming.

Products used in client/server environments

                             1994   1995   1996    1997
                                                 projected

Average number of
OSs and NOSs installed        8     10     12      13

Average number of
DBMSs installed               6      8      9      10

Average number of
development tools installed  12     14     17      19

SOURCE: SENTRY MARKET RESEARCH

RELATED ARTICLE: A Support Supplement

Keyword question-and-answer forums, information on the status of service cases, accessible patch files and realtime chats with certified internetworking experts are just some of the service features making their way to the World Wide Web. One vendor taking advantage of the Web as a service delivery vehicle is Cisco Systems Inc., a San Jose, Calif., maker of routers and the IOS (Internetwork Operating System).

"The Web allows Cisco customers to help themselves," says Sam Kapreilian, vice president of marketing for Metrix Inc., Waukesha, Wisc., developer of the software driving Cisco's Internet service application. "Customers can log a support call through a series of menus or input realtime online queries and get their questions answered or search a knowledge engine and answer their own problems."

Using a keyword search, users can find Web service pages for nearly every major OEM and software vendor, and from there scour their resource libraries for helpful tips. At some Web sites, including those of Cisco and Sun Microsystems' support arm, Sunservice, users can get online, interactive technical support in the form of chat rooms, providing they log-in as a current customer.

"You have a significant movement to the Internet. The first indication has been that all the top vendors have delivered Web browser access," says Bill Keyworth, research director for platforms and operation software at Gartner Group, Stamford, Conn. "Now, with Web browser access, it opens up remote technicians who are trying to get troubleshooting in the field, as well as to the end user. And instead of having to call the vendor via telephone, I'm able to notify them across the Internet via E-mail or go into home pages and search for resolutions."

But don't hang up that telephone too quickly. The telephone is and will continue to be the ultimate delivery vehicle through the year 2000, according to a 1996 survey by International Data Corp., Framingham, Mass. Internet service delivery has a long way to go; Users have to contend with slow downloads, mazes of Web pages, and technology that hasn't reached the point of consistently delivering fixes over the Internet. Analysts predict that it will take at least 10 years for the Internet to override the telephone for delivery of service and support.

"The Internet is good for run-of-the-mill, frequently asked questions. From the vendor perspective, anything that keeps their customers off the phone with paid phone engineers" is helpful, says Eric Rocco, senior analyst at Dataquest, Westborough, Mass. "In terms of a complex problem, the Internet will only be a front end. It won't be able to solve things until it's more user-friendly and comprehensive. We call it a supplement, not a substitute."

RELATED ARTICLE: How to Negotiate a Service Agreement

With more than 12,000 business partners, IBM's Lotus Development Corp., Cambridge, Mass., has its share of cross-application service calls to field. "In cases when it's an ISV solution on top of a Lotus program, the ISV takes responsibility for the entire configuration. To their customers, the ISV is the single face of support," notes Jim Adelson, senior director of alliances at Lotus.

Still, while vendors tout their partnership agreements, product support remains a sticky issue. Earlier this year, the project manager for a Princeton, N.J.-based insurance giant tried to upgrade a Micro Focus Cobol development tool that operates beneath an Intersolv client/server development tool. A problem arose when the debugging tool in the new version of Micro Focus didn't work with the existing version of the Intersolv program.

"We knew what and where the problem was," says Alex Zadrozny, project manager for the insurance company. "We had to coordinate the two vendors. I spent a lot of time on the phone getting them in sync with the right versions of the software we were running. We'd reach a point where we couldn't go any farther with one vendor because they didn't know the other's software well enough, so wed have to go back to the other vendor." Three months and four patches later, Intersolv labs finally debugged the problem, enabling the new Micro Focus version to operate with its software. "I'd expect that when a vendor releases a product that it supports all of its software versions," Zadrozny says. "This is one of those scenarios that fell through the cracks."

Service fiascoes with "bleeding-edge" products are common, says Todd Thompson, manager of IT implementation at Lockheed Martin's Loral Corp. facility in Anaheim, Calif. "Many times, products are released before they are ready. Select stable, tried products," he says.

Avoiding these type of situations will cut down on service needs. If organizations are looking into outsourcing as a way to reduce service overhead, they should start by taking inventory of their software and hardware, advises Eric Rocco, senior analyst at Dataquest, Westborough, Mass. They should then select a vendor that offers a breadth of support offerings to maintain most or all of their products. "They [the service vendor] should be able to deliver the solution themselves or partner with someone else so the service is seamless to the customer," Rocco says. "Make sure the vendor has certification in a variety of technologies," adds Gary Wright, vice president of worldwide service for intersolv's ServiceDirect Division, Rockville, Md.

Bill Beaumont, vice president of marketing for DecisionOne, a multivendor service and support company in Frazer, Pa., offers a checklist for those considering third-party vendor support:

* Know the objectives in procuring a service contract; * Establish quantitative yardsticks and benchmarks; * Involve senior managers who understand the company's overall objectives; * Communicate these objectives throughout the organization; * Structure flexibility into contracts to allow change in terms and conditions as technology evolves; * Have an escape clause in case the vendor doesn't work out; * Have the same staff work on a new service agreement f rom negotiation through implementation; * Contract with a reputable service vendor; * Visit and interview customer companies who have used the supplier; * Use good third-party support experts if the organization lacks the internal expertise to negotiate the contract.

Negotiating the contract all boils down to one issue, says Dataquest's Rocco. "The vendor has to be able to take the call."

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