Cloud Cuckoo Land
Everybody talks about cloud services. Everyday we receive new cloud offerings from all big vendors. And the marketing machineries work very well – at least customers are testing the offerings more and more.
So does mine. Big company, very blue and yellow deciders. And yellow consultants. Conclusion: We will look at LotusLive first.
IBM opened a virtual space for my customer. We started configuring the service and added our team members. All team members? No. There is just one team member that will stay outside the cloud. It´s me.
The reason is simple. All members were new members to LotusLive. Except me. Unfortunatly I did not want to pay for the LotusLive service, so my test account expired and now we were not able to add my email adress:
Remember: We are in Germany and this messages tells the admin to call a US number. Of course he can not call US number from his business phone.
Meanwhile I tried to log in with my old data. Fail. I was told username and password are wrong. So I tried to recover my password, entered my email adress – and was told that my account will be reset immediatly and I will receive a new password. This was about 6 hours ago. Still no email from LotusLive.
So I decided to write to support@lotuslive.com, of course in german, because the User Interface is in german so I was sure there is german speaking support staff on the other site. Then I received an automated response from an account named “ASC”, email adress “ASC@virtela.com”. Who the hell is “Virtela” I thought:
Oha, it´s the LotusLive support, answering in english. This was 11:27 local time. Still there is no answer from what they call the “Sebior support”.
IBM, if you want to play with the others in the cloud, you should care about this. If you offer the service world wide in local language, then you need to support this language. Without toll numbers in the US but with toll free local numbers. If you want to sell that stuff, you should be fast answering problems from test companies. They might change to another provider in the clouds. Its just one mouse click away.