This post pre-supposes that you have heard of twitter – if you haven’t, check out the wikipedia article. NetBackup has been on twitter for a while. Mostly we tweet NetBackup news or pointers to blog posts. When we see someone tweeting about NetBackup we’ll tweet back and see if there is anything we can do to help.
I have been very inspired to read about Comcast and how they use twitter as an adjunct to their normal email and phone customer service. Twitter, in addition to it's usefulness as a micro-blog platform, can be a great way to find out about problems early and prevent customers from becoming dissatisfied. (In the interest of full disclosure at home I’m a Comcast customer who has personally contacted @comcastcares and had a great experience.)
So last week, I got my own chance, when I got a distressing tweet from a NetBackup admin, Seth Bokelman from the University of Northern Iowa, who was reporting a problem with backup speed. When Symantec Endpoint Protection was installed the backups ran at 18 kps and without it the backups ran at 5400 kbps. What is that something like 99% slower?!? It’s the kind of issue that causes more than a mild case of indigestion - after all Symantec wants to solve several problems in your environment including backup, archive, security and storage. When our products don’t work right together, it’s a real issue.
I rolled up my sleeves and started working through my contacts. Faster than I expected I found the right engineers who pointed me to the release notes for the MR4 MP1 rev of SEP where the issue had been fixed! A few days later I got confirmation from the customer and I can sleep better now. Score one point for solving a real problem with twitter. Now if you have a problem, tech support is always the right place to go, but know we're listening and we are ready to help.
Tim Burlowski
Technical Product Manager
Message Edited by TimBur on 02-19-2009 03:32 PM
