EMC announced last month a variety of new and expanded support services.
The new offerings will include:
• Enhanced EMC WebSupport, which lets customers create support cases online, track them and receive notification of their progress or resolution.
• Expanded Certified Data Erasure services, in which EMC provides for the erasure and certification of data on IBM and Hitachi Data Systems arrays, as well as its own Symmetrix and Clariion arrays.
• New services for EMC’s ControlCenter, Documentum and Networker products.
• Enhanced Secure Remote Support services.
• A secure support service for government agencies.
• The opening of an additional Global Support Center.
“We are announcing a series of industry standards that will continue to provide excellent flexibility and choice for secure support provided by EMC, [and] we’re providing greater customer and product-specific technical knowledge, in order to accelerate resolution and information availability,” said Leo Colborne, senior vice-president for Global Customer Service at EMC, during a conference call with analysts.
“As product portfolios have continued to improve across the board, services — both proactive and high-end consulting — will continue to be an important area of differentiation for vendors,” says Tony Prigmore, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
EMC WebSupport will now allow customers to create problem resolution cases online rather than through a support call to EMC. Once the case is created, customers can track the progress of the case and receive notice from EMC on its progress or resolution. The expanded WebSupport will allow EMC to more accurately identify the components of a customer’s environment and securely send and receive log files from customers pertaining to the problem at hand.
Customers can query cases or the times their EMC gear automatically dialed EMC support to report problems — dial home incidents. They then can save those searches for future reference.
The Certified Data Erasure Service allows customers to be compliant with government and industry regulations regarding the disposal of digital data. The present service lets EMC technicians erase drive data on EMC Symmetrix and Clariion arrays and certify that erasure has been completed. The service is being expanded to include erasure of IBM and Hitachi Data System arrays that are attached to mainframes. EMC is evaluating the capability to erase IBM and Hitachi equipment attached to open systems host computers.
The company also expects to handle the erasure of individual drives in an array in the second quarter of this year.
The company will also announce The Gateway, which is an IP-based remote monitoring and support service for all EMC storage arrays. The Gateway provides authentication, authorization, audit capabilities and encryption, providing customers with greater security and control over storage environments.
Also featured will be a series of support options for government agencies, which includes 24/7 access to support U.S.-based engineers, a dedicated phone line and case management queues that are segmented from the general-support queues. The company says 60 public sector agencies participate in the program.
Further, EMC will enhance the services it offers to EMC ControlCenter, Documentum and Legato Networker customers. The upgraded services will include a designated support engineer who can remotely monitor the customer’s environment, an onsite support engineer who specializes in these applications and is available to the customer four times a year, and priority onsite support for faster troubleshooting and problem resolution.
Finally, EMC has opened a new technical support facility in Hopkinton, Mass., where 120 support engineers will process customer calls and resolve problems.
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