The Empire Strikes Out

If our recent experience is to be a future indicator of IBM/Lenovo's performance, we're in for a very long and painful three years.

The earlier lull in my posting to this blog was due to participation in our tri-annual desktop replacement project. All desktop hardware is kept on three year leases here, and the replacement of that equipment is a pretty intensive effort. (Of course, we use ZEN very successfully to streamline and simplify the deployment. Over 350 PC's in 20+ locations, across 15 business days - not a single end-user file or application missing).

This time around, as you may recall, we switched from Dell to IBM hardware - this was just as IBM had sold off their desktop and laptop business to Lenovo. All of the equipment we're buying still says IBM, but we order through reps who have Lenovo business cards & paychecks.

So, on to the problems.

FAR too frequently, issues with hardware are met with "out-of-stock" stories from IBM/Lenovo, followed by part ETA's ranging from 5-10 days. We have 4 hour support contracts on all of this equipment, which apparently means a tech will be on-site within 4 hours to tell you that it's not getting fixed that day.

I know that Dell has been roundly rogered for it's support of late - certainly it's decline was one of the reasons we pursued an alternate vendor - but their desktop support looks like the 2nd coming of Christ compared to the B.S. we've been fighting with at IBM.

The latest instance of these problems have been embodied by two unrelated system board failures. Fans come on, drives spin up, but the system won't post. Both times, technicians over the phone indicated the problem was the motherboard. Both times, they quoted a parts ETA of over one week. Both of these incidents have occurred in a span of about 3 business days.

I'm turning up the heat rather briskly on our Lenovo reps - next will be IBM Global Finance. Perhaps the thought of reposessing 350 PC's that we are no longer paying for will help to get someone motivated to find a solution.