I can imagine how this will be received by some…but what do you all think about a paid support option from Vera? So far, I like the hardware, see the promise of what the software can become, and think the support is extremely poor at best. It takes them days to respond, their answers are cursory at best and they don’t do a great job of seeing a problem through to completion.
However, I can see how Vera has trouble investing much in support given that they have no real ongoing revenue stream. They made money off of me via the hardware purchase, but likely not enough to cover the years of high quality support that I want to receive.
I would gladly pay…what…$100/year(?) for phone-based support with SLAs and all that good stuff. Not as a required fee, but a premium add-on for those of us who are willing to pay for a higher level of support.
And, before the miserly folks jump in and start screaming about how all that should be free…then please explain to me how Vera’s business model is supposed to work with free, high quality support? How do they pay for the ongoing costs when they earn revenue from you on a one-time event?
Paid support does NOT assure any improvement in the quality of the support. Regarding SLA’s, in my opinion, they are loved by middle managers and accountant who wish to avoid responsibility/blame in the event of a failure, but they are far less valuable than a roll of Charmin.
As an example, I have SLA’s from several major national telecommunication providers, for circuits that we pay tens of thousands per month for. We are supposedly regarded as a hicap and high priority customer. The SLA’s make all sorts of promises, but when there is a cable cut or routing failure and it takes days to repair, despite the four hour SLA, our only recourse is a reduction on billing during the time of outage. SLA’s are utterly useless in solving real problems!
[quote=“Z-Waver, post:3, topic:183302”]Paid support does NOT assure any improvement in the quality of the support. Regarding SLA’s, in my opinion, they are loved by middle managers and accountant who wish to avoid responsibility/blame in the event of a failure, but they are far less valuable than a roll of Charmin.
As an example, I have SLA’s from several major national telecommunication providers, for circuits that we pay tens of thousands per month for. We are supposedly regarded as a hicap and high priority customer. The SLA’s make all sorts of promises, but when there is a cable cut or routing failure and it takes days to repair, despite the four hour SLA, our only recourse is a reduction on billing during the time of outage. SLA’s are utterly useless in solving real problems![/quote]
Everything he said. I help manage and vet multi-million dollar technology contracts. SLAs (ie, paid support, financial penalties, etc) are worthless. I run the web infrastructure for a top 100 website in the USA, if we are down for any reason, no SLA or financial compensation is going to make up for the revenue loss and tarnishing of the brand (which is priceless).
MCV has spent years earning their bad reputation. No amount of paid support is going to change that, management/leadership has to change.
Which has little to nothing to do with me wanting improved support for my lowly little Vera 3. My brand isn’t going to be tarnished if I can’t get my Z-Wave switch working.
My suggestions were less about SLAs (which people seem to have latched onto) and more about improving the overall quality of MCV’s support offerings, by enabling it as a revenue stream for them.
I manage telecommunications services for a government telecommunications supplier, and I don’t even bother with SLAs. At best you get a few dollars off your next invoice, when they might have caused you $$$ in lost customer revenue. Better you make yourself redundant with multiple suppliers than to expect one to perform better based on an SLA.
That said, I would support a paid option if we get better access to their servers. My problem with remote MIOS access is they have no real incentive to keep it working well… So it is flaky…
I disagree a bit. I think that they do have an incentive to keep the service running well because if they develop a reputation for failures then people will stop buying their product.
I know that Vera LTD(MCV) don’t run their own servers, instead relying on Amazon AWS, EC2, et al. It is my suspicion that Vera LTD, is a small group with offshored development and that the UI7 development and architectural changes are proving to be a bigger task than they had expected. I do not believe that it is a simple lack of caring or monetary incentive that is causing recent outages or delays in support. They are simply failing to scale well with the increased customer base and their new architecture. Whether or not throwing more dollars at the issue will get it all resolved more quickly is a possibility that is up for debate.