Oracle Corp. and EMC Corp. announced on Monday the opening of a joint service centre that will provide support and quicker problem resolution for the companies' shared customers, according to the firms.
The Joint Service Centre, located in Hopkinton, Mass., is staffed with engineers from both companies. It will provide both proactive and reactive services including collaborative analysis and issue resolution to over 20,000 shared customers around the world, according to the companies. Customers will receive assistance to simplify complex operational issues surrounding management and maintenance of the enterprise applications on Oracle's database and EMC's networked storage products, the companies said in a statement.
Support engineers based in the centre will be able to create and mirror customer environments, proactively identifying potential problem areas and fixing them to prevent customer downtime and service level degradation.
"The Oracle and EMC Joint Service Centre not only provides better and faster service support for our customers, it creates an environment for uncovering and developing new product integration and support best practices," said Juan Jones, Redwood Shores, Calif.-based vice-president of systems, platforms division at Oracle, in a statement.
In an effort to provide seamless support, both Oracle and EMC will transfer customers' service assistance calls to the centre to solve the problem with the other's equipment, rather than asking them to hang up and call the other company, said Doug Kennedy, Seattle-based vice-president of platform alliances with Oracle.
"The whole point was to make this seamless between multiple vendors for the customer, and not get into the finger-pointing or handing-off exercise," Kennedy said. "Today it's all about being able to better support customers, not just providing the best technology that's integrated from the start. This announcement on the JSC is a reflection of the maturity of that whole business relationship and now engineering and support relationship with EMC."
The centre will also provide an environment where best practices, solution sets and methodologies can all be created to assist customers and simplify design, implementation and management of complex networked storage and database infrastructure, the companies said.
Oracle can be found at http://www.oracle.com.
EMC is online at http://www.emc.com.