Living In A Land Of Confusion

Well, I finally was able to meet with the R&D Account Mgr about 4 PM. We went over the issue that is getting a lot of attention and after we chatted we made three phone calls. After the second one we were 90% sure we had our answer and after the third...well I was positive that the "issue" is being blown out of proportion and the answer is simple...

The issue is complicated, but I will try to give you the "Reader's Digest" version:

One of our customers bought out a company. The employees that were absorbed work at a site that had to VPN into the network of the company that absorbed them. To do this, a lot of networking tricks had to be done as well as some slick software tweaking. This was made all the more complicated by the fact that the company that was absorbed routes all its traffic over the public internet and the absorbing company has private leased lines. It was going to take a lot of time and money to get the site configured and connected to the new parent company, so the VPN solution was interim. The site now has direct connections to the parent company's network. They can access the old system via the original way and their new parent company via the private leased lines. The have 2 net connections in each office...one for each network.

The company that was absorbed has a contract with another provider for IT support. That provider is not allowed to have access to our systems and since the absorbed company now uses our customers corporate desktop and net connections...the IT provider on contract has very little to do, so they have convinced the absorbed company to continue using the VPN solution because so they can cut and paste between systems and use one PC instead of two. The problem is the VPN solution is flaky...it was not designed to do long term what they are using it for. So the IT support group makes a big stink about the substandard product. The solution is to use the officially supported product provided by our customer, not the interim solution we helped them build to get their new employees connected quickly.

We have been through this before, so it is not new to us...however it still annoys me.

This is exactly what happens when you outsource IT to multiple vendors. In this case, we are trying to coordinate IT among 5 groups, 3 of which are IT companies and 2 that are telecom companies. The kicker is that my company "owns" IT for the customer AND the other outsourced companies. Brilliant. We get all the heartache and a small payoff.

Okay, on to brighter news. I had dinner with my wife at a local Chinese place, talked to our son in Kuwait, bought a UPS for the home office, and watched "The Illusionist". Finally a film starring Edward Norton that I liked.

Okay, time for bed!

Oh, before I forget, I have been working on "Chronicles". I have 4 chapters started and they will be at some time published. It is pretty rough...I am no writer, but I think it will entertain to a small degree.