Car Crash
May 16th, 2007
On almost a weekly basis one of my friends will direct me to YouTube for a little light entertainment; my current favorite videos are David Spade’s Blackberry Addiction intervention, and the hilarious Evil-Ka ads from Ford. Last week, Jamie, one of my friends at Ingres, posted an old Ingres commercial on YouTube - it’s pretty funny, and highlights how Ingres impacts just about every aspect of our lives. Check it out if you have a couple of minutes to spare. Many of our customers are running Ingres in mission critical situations, which is the premise of the video.
The team that supports these customers understands the urgency with which Ingres outages need to be addressed. We have an awards program to recognize Ingres support excellence for our customers at our quarterly internal events. These are almost always team awards with folks working around the clock and across the globe to get our customers back up and running as quickly as possible.
Our most recent award went to a team that was supporting one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. The award was well deserved because if Ingres fails the manufacturing line stops, which has significant business impact. The application that had a problem is one through which a new car buyer can select various options to purchase a customized car. The application gathers the information, generates an order that is sent to the factory floor, and then tracks the order through the manufacturing process to customer delivery. It also ties into a parts tracking and car maintenance application, so when it comes to these cars Ingres is involved from the cradle to the grave.
When the customer closed the issue they provided the following feedback “pass on my thanks to whoever regarding the efficiency of the Ingres “follow the sun” support centre. Not once did I have to rehash the problem before getting a response. It was as if each person was sitting in on problem discussions the whole time.” This is exactly the level of support that open source companies strive for, and we’re fortunate at Ingres that we have a support team that’s been working together to support mission critical deployments for almost a decade.
I’d love to get more visibility onto mission critical Ingres deployments, so if you have an interesting story to share please drop me a note.
