In the article written by Jonathan Moser on the 1st of November.

http://www.postmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=63930E9D02644EC9A127AF67602DA756&nm=E%2DNewsletters&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=F2B2F1B15FC54898BE62CBD1EF25D5BD

There is this part:

Arnold also had to change Avid’s negative image. “We listen” became the mantra. Customer and editor advisory boards established, customer support became “Customer Success” with a revamped support network. “Code Blue” support was created. “When we have a customer who has a problem with our product stopping their ability to work — that goes to a system when top leadership would call them personally,” says Arnold.

Dear Kirk,

I'm a customer of you. Not your biggest I'm sure but with 15 MC's, 1 Xpress pro, 2 Lanshare's and 1 Unity 5 also not your smallest. The company I work for is also a long time customer and started with an Xpress Elite on windows NT.

I'm trying from around June to have all my systems covered by a support contract through your reseller in Greece. Because of several reasons that process has had a lot of delays. Recently this process has taken a very positive turn and the correct offers are finally arriving and now being discussed internally.

But for almost a year now we are facing portserver crashes. Several visits of the reseller tech. re-imaging, updating the unity to 5.1.1 and client 5.1.2 all without desired result. Due to expansion of the ethernet clients from 5 to 7, 2 months ago, the increase in frequency of these crashes have left us with "a problem with your product stopping our ability to work".

I have also contacted Marianna Montague and posted several posts in the unity forum about the issue and asked her if she could help with getting a helping hand from support. Her answer was that I have to find support through my reseller, who contacts england, who contacts Tewksbury. I hoped for a different response but, as a long time avid and forum user, have the highest respect for her efforts and trust her advice without doubt. Logic of the support contracts and the people paying for support having priority makes perfect sense. So all logs were taken by my reseller and send to england. This has left me with a very unstable system for 2 months now.

And now I read this in the article of Jonathan Moser. Has he mis-quoted you by writing "a customer" while he should have written "a customer with an active support contract"? If so then just delete this post.

Point is that all these statements like "listening, new attitude, retooled technology" have to be backed up with products and services for the customer so these statements are credible. I'm not saying they are not but the feeling I got from my individual experience when reading this passage in Jonathan Moser's article was a big "WHAT????"

Hi Jeron,

I'm confused about a couple of things. First, did you try to get an Avid support contract? The reason I ask is, we can get you covered TODAY if you want one. There is absolutely no reason that this should take even a week to accomplish.

With that support contract, you have access to our entire team in Europe/EMEA and none of this would be an issue so I don't understand where the disconnect is happening.

Now, on the flip side, your second option is to go with support from a reseller but that is their support contract with you and, while we do back them up with tools and education, it's not the same, at all, as having a contract with Avid directly.

The second thing I wanted to ask about is, with your shared storage and Unity, I can't see a reason why you may not have gone with a support contract directly. That's a lot of infrastructure to cover yourself and, as a facility owner myself, I would not be sleeping at night thinking about all the points of failure and no backup.

Please let Marianna and me know how we can help smoth the process at all.

BLKDOG:

I'm confused about a couple of things. First, did you try to get an Avid support contract? The reason I ask is, we can get you covered TODAY if you want one. There is absolutely no reason that this should take even a week to accomplish.

With that support contract, you have access to our entire team in Europe/EMEA and none of this would be an issue so I don't understand where the disconnect is happening.

Now, on the flip side, your second option is to go with support from a reseller but that is their support contract with you and, while we do back them up with tools and education, it's not the same, at all, as having a contract with Avid directly.

Thanks Todd for your reply,

Let me explain a bit more. First of all the delay was caused by 1st the reseller having 2 entries in the avid reseller database. A reseller can only access the systems it has sold. So they always missed systems depending under which reseller name they logged in at the avid reseller site. This has been corrected.

2nd, Although a transfer fee was paid to avid for an adrenaline system we bought from another production company together with four Xpress pro HD systems which we all together registered and upgraded to MC version 3 these registrations did not pop up at any of the resellers database entries in the avid registration database. In short there were 3 "Ena productions" instead of 1. These errors have been corrected by now.

Getting support contracts for systems that are not registered correctly is not possible. The reseller did not do enough at first to get this fixed but together with the resellers sales manager this was recently completely fixed.

Unfortunately this caused my support contract for my Unity5 to expire.

Before I start discussing if I need a contract directly with avid. I would like to return this thing with a question to you. What is the added value of an Avid reseller? I don't think they will be very happy with what you are suggesting.

Your second thing... Indeed I've missed a lot of sleep the last weeks... Anyway. That lack of sleep has caused me to find a number of issues in which the avid media networks 5.1.1/5.1.2 documentation is missing crucial information. Regardless if I have a support contract or not I think I'm entitled to correct and complete system requirements.

I requested on the forum and in PM to Marianna what the supported firmware is for the SMC-8824m switch. No firmware is mentioned in the documentation or knowledge base. See my other thread.

http://community.avid.com/forums/t/76052.aspx

Second the 5.1.1 medianet software comes with a new driver for the Intel 1000PM/PL network card. No mentioning in the documentation anywhere of this driver and what problem this driver fixes.

The response of Marianna was that I have to point these requests towards my reseller. And that made me come full circle. The reseller that could not solve the issue is waiting for an answer from.... well Avid.

I assume you understand that after having regular unity crashes and trying for a long time to have system wide support and follow the advices of Avid employees and reseller that it is kind of frustrating reading this interview by Jonathan Moser.