[p4] Paying Perforce Support

[Robert Cowham]

All this risk analysis is good stuff.

Worthwhile looking at ISO20000/BS15000/ITIL - while that is a service
management standard, it has a lot to recommend on best practice for business
continuity planning.

The key point here is that management need to make appropriate choices for
the business. IT continuity planning is then driven by business continuity
(not the other way around!).

Costs for developers twiddling their thumbs would appear to be fairly
convincing, but I have seen management refuse to spend < $8k for a backup
server and a disk to disk to tape backup strategy when THAT ORGANISATON HAS
ALREADY HAD a corruption/restore from backup scenario which conservatively
cost them $40k.

You have to wonder sometimes!

Robert

> -----Original Message-----
> From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com 
> [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of 
> Jason McClellan
> Sent: 16 May 2006 17:01
> To: perforce-user at perforce.com
> Subject: Re: [p4] Paying Perforce Support
> 
>  
> 
> Support/maintenance can be a hard sell sometimes, especially 
> with cheapskate management. Some people think you bought the 
> software, it's yours and that's it.  Some even go so far as 
> to think that you bought the software, it's yours and you 
> should be entitled to help with it forever too. Ha.  
> 
> But in reality, maintenance is like insurance. You depend on 
> that system working properly. Sure, it isn't *supposed* to 
> break, work wrong, etc.
> but things happen, usually due to PEBKAC or related issues, 
> and there you are having to fix it. When that happens, the 
> question is, do they want you to be stuck there, having to 
> research, hack, play, kludge, whatever you have to do to get 
> it working on your own, in who knows how much time, or do 
> they want you to have a resource to depend on for help?
> 
> 
> Many will say that the system never broke before, why bother. 
> But they still insure their houses, even though they never 
> burned down before.. 
> 
> IMHO..
> 
> Jason