Archiving Truth
The world of archiving would be a much happier place if vendors told their customers the whole truth when talking about their solutions. What follows are conversations drawn from real world situations that tell the story behind what archiving vendors say.
Customer Asks:
"My firm has a unique way of doing things that is not always conventional. Because of this, I often have to call on vendor support to understand how to make solutions work with my infrastructure. How responsive is your support staff? How many people do you have handling customer and technical support? Can I get the questions I need answered?"Customer Also Asks:
"My firm is under the gun 24x7. Email is our lifeblood. Email equals dollars. But we are constantly concerned about compliance and regulations, which is why we want to use your system to review and monitor our email. But if your system goes down will you be there to fix it? Do you know how to fix it?"
Vendor Says:
"Definitely. BigCo is one of the largest most well-regarded software firms in the world. We have the largest support and call centers in the world. All your questions can be answered."
Vendor Doesn't Say:
"... but if you ask me how long it takes or ask me about our average time to resolution, I can't really give you an answer. Because BigCo's Archiving Solution is really made up of about half a dozen OEM partner components, we don't really know how they work or, when they're broken, how to fix them. We pretty much call the OEM up like any other customer would and wait to find out if there's a patch or bugfix or workaround.This can take a long time, hours, sometimes days. If a code change is required it might take weeks or months assuming the OEM agrees to do it. We have no way to help our customers if our OEM partners choose not to. We are dependent upon our OEM partner to do it and in their timeframe, since we don't control any of that code. Until then, you'll just have to wait."
ZL Says:
"All major components of ZL's solution, search engine, archiving engine, parsing engine, ingestion architecture, GRID architecture, etc. are controlled by ZL. ZL is not dependent upon third party OEM's to provide or fix our code because ZL does.ZL does not need a massive support organization because it is rare that the ZL system goes down in a production environment. And when it does, the right people can be there quickly, to make sure that the problem is solved efficiently and with the least disruption to your environment. If something is wrong or a new development is required, ZL is able to do so very quickly.
Because there are less moving parts and friction points than other solutions, there are fewer issues. And when a critical support question does come in, ZL can pinpoint the issue very quickly due to our comprehensive profiling tools, resulting in the shortest times to resolution. You can't get that kind of support from any vendor relying upon OEM components or partners, no matter how close a partnership they claim or how many support staff they have."
Learn the Truth About Archiving:
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