Re: Power 7 Order and Return

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:10 PM, DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

THis is a failure of the Business Partner.

No one is contesting this.

The rules are and HAVE BEEN
for some time that the Donor and the Recipient machines are at the SAME
SOFTWARE level and that permanent keys are lost on the donor machine as
soon as they transfer to the Recipient machine.

Why is this the rule? I'm not saying there's no good reason for it;
but I'm asking because I don't know. And, it sounds like the customer
had decided that they wanted the same software level on both machines
anyway, just that they jumped the gun on one of the steps.

If you absolutely need to run the two machines in parallel
then you can order from IBM as part of the process extra time on the old
machine.

OK, so you're implying that there's some reasonable, workable solution
for the customer. How would the customer know to do this? If you say
"well, the BP should be able to handle this" then we're back to
relying on the BP, whom we've already established is a bonehead.
Clearly, the customer wants extra time. At least more than 15 days.

The point is, the customer's requirements don't sound to me like
crazy, let's-really-take-advantage-of-IBM kind of requirements. They
sound pretty reasonable.

Anyone who keeps insisting that IBM is blameless has lost sight of
normal-person thinking. The hoops and rigamarole that IBM has put in
place seem extremely arbitrary to me. I'm sure I'm ignorant. But for
the prices IBM is charging, they should be offering exemplary service
and should be utterly customer-focused. Even if the fault is entirely
the customer's, how does it hurt IBM to still come back and say "OK,
we're sorry your business partner didn't handle things properly, but
let's figure out how to make this work."

Can just anyone be a BP, or is there some kind of certification required?

John