Experiences with SUN

[Mark Plotnick]

Your experiences are not unique; we've been having problems with Sun
for as long as anyone here can remember (I've only been dealing with
them for the past 18 months).  I know they're still considered by many
to be a startup company, so perhaps some of our problems are
unavoidable.

We think the machines are really nice - our lab, 100 computer
scientists, has 75 of them, with 15 more on order - but the sales and
support leave much to be desired.

Sales:

We and other customers at our site have had to wait up to 3 months to
get quotes on certain items (disk cables, source code, maintenance
contracts).  As with you, California says they can't help us and we
have to wait for the local office to get around to doing things.

We don't appreciate the fact that, after we've placed
orders, they can rarely tell us when the orders will be shipped.
Memory boards and color upgrades have typically taken 6 to 8 months to
ship, and we're still waiting for some things we ordered last summer.
YOU try telling a department head who wants to put a color monitor on
his Sun that you have no idea when it will come, and that it
may not be until 1987!

When ordering entire systems, one gets faster delivery (within a month
or two of the projected date).  But file servers always seem to get
delivered last, and in some cases (as with the people in a neighboring
building who have had diskless Sun-3 clients sitting unused since late
December) this makes the portion of the order that's been delivered
pretty useless.  We've gotten into the habit of stating "no partials"
on our orders.

Maintenance:

We purchased an "on-site" service contract in late 1984, and were told
in writing that it was Sun's intent to put someone physically at our
site full-time.  We paid a lot for this (1.3% of list price per machine
per month), yet they still don't have someone residing on-site.  I was
told by someone in another company that Sun's service contract prices
were lowered in March 1985; when I asked Sun about this, they said that
price list didn't apply to us, since we were paying extra for the
COMMITMENT to have someone resident on-site.  After a series of
meetings over the last few months, Sun agreed to lower the prices to
those in the July 1985 price list.

We've also heard that a $1500/site/month software contract has been
available for some time, possibly dating from early 1985.  Our lab
is paying over $3000 per month for software maintenance (assuming $70
to $75 per machine per month, which can be extracted from the different
rates in the current price list), and there are other customers
at this location that are also paying this rate.  We have asked
Sun several times to give us retroactive credit, since we
certainly would have converted to the lower-priced contract had we known
about it, but we're still waiting for action.

The skill of the field service people has varied widely, and I could
tell some real horror stories, but don't think it's worth describing
them here because I feel it's mainly a result of Sun's growing pains.
I'll note a few things: (1) some people will still not let any Sun FE
touch their systems because of some particularly bad experiences.
(2) Sun's on-site service contract differs from many other
companies' in that it doesn't specify the maximum time period that can
elapse between the logging of a call and the point at which an FE comes
to see you.  It can sometimes be more than a week.

We received some Sun-3's in late December/early January.  None of them
are yet in service, and the warranties are half over.  2 of the 7
systems were short-shipped (missing cables), and repeated phone calls
have not yet gotten any action.  We don't have a vme tape drive, and
thus can't load the 3.0 software onto the Sun-3's (the version of the
software that will work on our Sun-2 systems, which is where all our
tape drives lie, is not available to us yet).  Sun couldn't accommodate
us in any way (e.g. by loaning us a vme-to-multibus adapter or a vme
tape drive for a day).

Last week, we got tired of waiting for a miracle and got things loaded
onto one system by hauling its disks over to Sun's district office and
loading the software there ourselves.  We brought the disks back here,
put them in a 160, and the 160 dropped dead after 2 days (bad cpu
board).  The person logging the service call here thought that maybe
Sun could bring in a new cpu board when they dropped by to fix some
other systems (we have about 50 Sun-2 systems on contract, and the FE
comes here at least once a week).  NO!  We had to buy an on-site
service contract for this new system first!

After some people higher up at Sun were contacted, they said they could
make an exception in just this one case (but we had already decided to
call up the eastern service center, which arranged to have California
ship us a cpu board in the mail with hopefully a week's delay); the
effort expended in getting this concession underscored to us that
Sun has little interest in building good working relationships with
their customers.  Despite the fact that my lab has 1.5 million dollars
worth of Suns, and spends over $100K per year for maintenance, Sun
won't do anything they're not required to do.  Sun may argue that they
can't make exceptions if they are to make money; we argue that buying
computer systems is more than just signing contracts and exchanging
cash for hardware, and that when our users and staff get a negative
feeling about a vendor, it's time to start looking for another vendor.

	Mark Plotnick
	allegra!mp