One of the hot topics this Momentum Vienna is the OnDemand. The new cloud offering of EMC. This blog is not about how great OnDemand is (but I assure you, it is!), this blog is about the reason why a consultancy firm like Informed Consulting, who makes money with third line application support on Documentum, should and is promoting OnDemand.
It is not an easy thing to sell internally. On average a third line support deal for a medium size Documentum solution is between 30k and 150k. When you use OnDemand most of these hours will be part of the full OnDemand deal and that will be done by EMC not us.
So why even mention this to a client? The answer is simple, I like the best for my clients.
Yes, I know for sure there are not better skills engineers than the Informed Consulting support staff and yes giving your Documentum support to Informed Consulting will minimize your frustration with your end users as response times go up and downtime goes down. (and that is a proven statement, over and over again!)
Yes, this is good money and yes, we love to do it
But here is the final clue: Documentum is build on an entire set of components, from OS to database, from JBoss server to Lucene search, from firewall to SAN storage (and you can continue this list for way way to long).
So, even if you have your app support managed by the best, the rest of the stack might be managed by the best, but not by a team that is dedicated to do Documentum support or more precise support on one of the components focussed on optimization for Documentum.
Our conclusion on OnDemand is: we rather do a new project and add new functionality than make money doing app support.
Also: a happy customer will add more to their Documentum environment than a customer which has frequent performance issues or downtime.