This blog represents the VMware Technical Account Manager or TAM program in the Asia Pacific and Japan Region including Australia and New Zealand. This is a professional service offered by VMware around the world. Many organisations offer a TAM in some form or another for their customers but what exactly does a TAM do and why would you want to have one as part of your organisation.
Well to begin with the VMware TAM program is unlike many other vendor TAM programs in that it is not tied to any support service or contract. This gives the TAM the flexibility to work on pro-active solutions for the customer without focusing or waiting for an incident to occur. Of course if there is an incident then the TAM is able to do many things to assist you during the process of working with support services and acts as a mediator and manager during this time.
Another benefit of the TAM is that they are able to work onsite with you when it is convenient. For example I am onsite with each of my customers every week. This gives me and my customers the opportunity to discuss many aspects of their environment and because I spend so much time with each of them I gain an intimate understanding of their environment and what they are trying to achieve. This puts me in a unique position as often I am across many of the organisations teams and am able to articulate the benefits of using a particular solution or design over another based on this knowledge.
There are so many duties that a TAM can perform as part of their engagement with their customer but here is a highlight of some of them that I perform for my customers on a regular basis. This is not an exhaustive list and by no means is this what every TAM does, as I said the TAM service is a very unique and customized service that often changes over time.
The TAM Virtualization Assessment is a capacity planning analysis that TAM’s can provide for the customers environment on an ongoing basis. This is often used to identify systems that the customer feels may be hard to virtualise or to understand the requirements of a current physical system to ensure when it is virtualised it will perform as expected.
The VMware TAM newsletter is a weekly newsletter specifically for the TAM community. It is loaded with information and customised for you to ensure that you receive relevant and timely information regarding all the goings on at VMware in your region. Your TAM is also able to discuss these items and you are encouraged to do this on a regular basis, possibly as part of your regular operations meeting.
Technical Updates: On a regular basis the TAM team hosts a Webex session for their customers which is a topical technical session presented by a VMware Subject Matter Expert. Your TAM will invite you to these sessions.
Product Briefings: Your TAM is able to provide many regular and ongoing product briefings for you on solutions relevant to your organisaion. If you have an NDA in place this may also include pre-release information.
Health Assessment: Ensuring the well being of your virtualised environment is paramount to your TAM and as part of the pro-active services provided on a regular basis your TAM can provide a review of your environment versus the best practices that VMware advises for it’s customers. This report is extremely detailed and can highlight possible issues or misconfigurations that might cause issues in the future.
Support Management: Requesting support when an issue occurs can be a stressful time for the team as they deal with the specific issue, notify the business and work to resolve the problem which could be occuring on many fronts. The TAM is your allie in these situations and will mange your support request ensuring that you are given the highest level of support possible from start to end including any escalations, engineering interventions or anything else that is required.
This is just a small sampling of the many services that a VMware TAM performs with their customers on a regular basis. Many are not aware of this and simply see a TAM as someone who deals with reactive support issues but actually that is probably less than 5% of my time, the rest of the time is spent pro-actively working with my customers to ensure that they get the highest level of service and are implementing world class solutions that we can all be proud of.
I am passionate about the TAM program and the benefits that it brings to the hundreds of customers around the world that utilise this service. TAM's are an incredibly talented and motivated army of professional VMware specialists at the disposal of our largest and most important customers every day.
