Johannesburg, 22 Feb 2017
Maintaining IT systems in order to run smoothly and successfully is often more time-consuming than you might expect. Apart from your own in-house applications, your hardware and operating systems (OS), patch management, version control, compatibility of your hardware and OS and apps, you also have the underlying middleware software running your business (which we like to call the plumbing). This adds another important layer to supporting IT systems and infrastructure.
CommerceQuest SA (CQSA) is an IBM Gold Business Partner, with a 20-year history and experience in selling, deploying and supporting the IBM software stack (covering IBM MQ, IBM MQ Appliance, IBM Integration Bus, WebSphere Application Server, and Connect:Direct products), but more importantly, making sure its customers do not need to worry about it.
CQSA's largest customers require full-time on-site support specialists to monitor, manage and support their systems on a 24/7 basis, while smaller customers do not have the need, but also do not have the skills on board.
Support can also cover not only production systems, but DEV, TEST, UAT and DR (disaster recovery) if these are critical to the business. The company has tailored and customised its support, varying between "heavy duty" and "light-weight" support for clients that may only need support during business hours.
Perhaps a site visit is required once a week or once a month? In some cases, MQ is checked via remote connection by CQSA's IBM support team each morning, and reports are sent via e-mail to the customer's nominated IT management and administrators. Whether CQSA provides an on-site, regular visit, or full remote support, or a combination - each customer is different, so support has to reflect what, when and how it is provided by CQSA.
The support CQSA provides for its customers keeps their systems in an "IBM Best Practice" fully operational state (not just when it was implemented and installed), enabling CQSA to be proactive in spotting and identifying issues and potential problems and dealing with these before an actual error occurs. Troubleshooting and working with the client if there is a critical outage or error is what CQSA has been doing for a long time, for a lot of companies.
Support requires SLAs on response times; these are put in place, often to fall in line with the customers' own SLAs. CQSA provides MQ monitoring tools for customers' internal IT administrators so they can track and easily monitor their messages, queues and channels via a TV monitor or Web access. CQSA uses MQMON to do this and build it in such a way that it is customised to what is important for you to see and know.
The IBM ILMT (IBM Licence Metric Tool) for keeping records of your IBM software usage throughout the company can also be covered under the support, generating monthly reports on behalf of the customer, checking for anomalies and making sure software licences are never in a breach situation.
The IBM support offerings can be as low as your monthly Internet or phone bill, and payable monthly, or can be paid annually in advance.
For more information on the IBM support, call Alex at CQSA on 011 447 4701 or e-mail Alex@CQSA.co.za.
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