Friday 7 September 2007

Foundry: the unhelpful company

I don't know why some companies insist on requiring logins to download user manuals for their products. What good is the manual of a ServerIron XL to me if I don't own an appliance or am not planning to buy one?

This is what you get from Foundry if you, like me, try to quickly study their equipment in order to do some network planning:
Thank you for registering for the Foundry KP. Unfortunately we are unable to complete your registration at this time. A valid support contract is required to access this valuable tool and our records indicate that your contract has expired. If this is a mistake please notify us as soon as possible to have the issue corrected.

We value you as a customer and as such we will notify your local account team and they will be contacting you shortly regarding obtaining a new support contract for your systems.
That translates to: give us more money or else we don't really care about you - we're just saying that because it sounds nice.

In time: my company does own Foundry appliances. Even if I knew where to get all the information they are requesting me, you still have to wait up to 48 hours for an account. In this day and age it is absolutely pathetic.

[UPDATE 10h53]: even if a company is unhelpful I'm glad to see there are helpful people within it. David White, systems engineering manager, was kind enough to send me the manual I needed. Thanks.

1 comment:

Paul Winkeler said...

Still though, what about my case: my customer has equipment hosted at some site which uses Foundry ServerIron XL gear for load-balancing and he just wants to learn more about what can be done with these things: no information forthcoming from anywhere! I am going to recommend we cancel the service and build our own load balancer using crossroads; lost another sale guys: nice job!
Open up a bit and show off your product's capabilities rather than hiding them; that is my answer to all vendors who insist on hiding their manuals