Here we go guys, Milestone are removing the integrator.
Whoever thought of this has no interest in the channel what so ever. Why on earth would a customer of ours be interesting in dealing with a support call about lets say a codec issue. I can count on one finger the amount of customers who are remotely interested in this. In the mean time the integrator is fielding calls from a hacked off end user who has been told by the customer Milestone support said its your camera..
So the integrator who has invested in commitment, expensive training courses, marketing etc gets side lined, why did we bother? Its not like the sales channel is protected you can get it anywhere now (probably why they are doing this, because they are swamped).
Support is under par at best, we struggle to get the gravity of for example a situation of a large system being offline due to a known bug in their software.
Your customer buys from the integrator - the solution from the integrator - it's the integrators issue to fix via the software vendor as a partnership.
The Elite should be a given for Gold and Platinum partners as default and in any other normal situation thats how it works. That is what a partner program is? We invest in training, marketing, support etc and sell the software. We buffer the crap from the software vendor in effect. In turn we are provided better buy rates ( trade pricing) and direct support. The software vendors gaining knowledge from the partners to improve and develop the software further.
What will happen is people will buy Milestone Corporate, with a care pack elite and fill up the Milestone support queue with questions like- how do i add a camera?
Very concerning, it is a position an ISV would only go to if you are going direct, after all why would you start asking for end user details and then do this a year later..