antipaucity

Let me compare the experience I wrote about yesterday to another I had the same year with the first customer I was ever sent to – HSBC.

Just a couple weeks after starting with ProServe in 2008, I was sent to Chicago to do a final PoC for HSBC. Someone else had done a PoC the previous year, but with HP’s acquisition of Opsware, HSBC (along with many other customers and potential customers) held-off on signing a purchase contract so they could bundle “everything” they wanted from HP under one big honking purchase order.

And due to changes in the underlying product architecture, HSBC wanted a fresh demo to play with for a little while before writing-in that line item into their PO.

Enter me. A freshly-minted consultant who hadn’t yet developed a solid cheat sheet. So fresh, I thought staying 20 minutes away in a Comfort Inn to save $12 a night was smart (it’s not – always stay as close to your customer as you can (that is within budget) when you’re traveling). But I digress.

After a set of unexpected flight delays, instead of being able to start Monday before lunch, I didn’t even get to meet the customer team until almost end-of-business Monday. Tuesday morning, my main contact met me at the door, escorted me into their lab, and introduced me to the “spare” hardware I’d be working on – a ~5-year-old Sun server running Solaris 10 (thankfully – they’d only just upgraded from Sun OS 9 on that machine a couple weeks before).

Like my main contact in Nutley later that year, my main contact at HSBC was an old hat Solaris admin – he’d been using and administering Sun equipment for nearly 20 years. Smart guy (but, unlike the guy in NJ that summer, he wasn’t a Sun fanboi purist).

The reason we were using retired (and, possibly, resurrected) hardware was because they didn’t trust one of the sales reps (who had since been fired) who made some pretty sweeping promises to them early on in the sales cycle. And, whomever had been in several months prior to do the first PoC had apparently complained bitterly about “having to use Sun”.

So they partially set me up to fail – but I was too dumb to realize it at the time…a perfect instance of the old phrase, “you can’t fool me, I’m too ignorant”.

(I did have to suffer through slow network access: the NIC onboard “supported” 100Mbps … but it was flaky, so it had been down-throttled to just 10Mbps. To put this is a little context, that was slower than my home internet access – even then – 10 years ago!)

Wednesday about lunchtime, the HSBC project manager for “HP automation initiatives” introduced herself and through our conversation, casually asked, “if you had your druthers, what kind of hardware would you install SA on to support our environment?”

So I answered what I’d use: each server in each SA Core (they were going to have 3) should have 16+ x86-64 CPUs, at least 32 GB RAM, and ample storage (at least 100 GB just for the install, let alone extra space which might be needed for the software and OS libraries). Oh. And it should be running RHEL – don’t use Solaris as the host OS for HPSA.

She pressed me to find out why I suggested this, and I told her, “because SA is written on Linux, and the ported to Solaris; every major issue SA has run into in the last few years regarding OS conflicts has happened on Sun hardware & OSes.”

A little while later, she thanked me for our conversation, thanked me for getting SA up and running so quickly (even on half decade out of date hardware, I had it installed and ready to demo to them in only a little over 1.5 days), which gave me time to go through its functionality, show-off some new things in 7.0 that hadn’t been possible (or as easy) in 6.1 (or 6.5, or 6.6), and even be told I could head out to the airport a little early on Thursday! Win-win-win all around.

Fast forward a few months.

I get a phone call from the engagement manager I’d worked with on the HSBC PoC week, and he asked me if I had a current passport. I told him, “yes,” and asked him why he wanted to know.

He then informed me that HSBC was getting ready to finalize a $12+ million dollar hardware, software, and services sale … but would only be buying SA if I was available to install it.

That’s cool – getting asked back is always a Good Thing™ … but what does that have to do with having a current passport? Bob elaborated: HSBC has a policy of vendors doing installs on site (not weird). And two of those “on site” locations were not in the US: one would be in London England, and the other in Hong Kong. “Would I be able to do that?”, he wanted to know.

“Yes. Yes, I would.”

“OK,” he said, “I’ll send travel dates and details in a few days.”

I hung up, then wondered if I’d said “yes” maybe a little too quickly: who gets asked to be the installation engineer who’s holding-up the finalization of a multi-million-dollar sale? Especially when I knew there were folks at least as qualified, if not much more so, available?

This was my first experience with being asked-back as a consultant (I’d been asked-for when I worked in Support, but that was very different).

And, ultimately, it’s what led to the single best services engagement I had for quite a while. And giving me a [partially] company-paid vacation to the UK. And getting my first stamps in my passport. And establishing a friendship with a customer contact in London who’ve I’ve stayed in touch with ever since.

All from not knowing the “project manager” was actually high-enough up in the HSBC management chain that her recommendations/requests for external personnel would be honored even on big contracts – and being truly honest with her when she asked what I viewed as a casual, throwaway question in a loud computer lab on a cool Wednesday afternoon in April.

The upshot is to always treat everyone you meet as “just another person” – whether a CEO or a janitor, they put their pants on the same way you do: one leg at a time.