Briefings Direct

As recent outages at Amazon Web Services and Sony PlayStation Network jar the common perception of IT business as usual, IT failures and performance snafus are nothing new, just perhaps more prominent.

Someone, somewhere got the first call on those outages -- the front line IT technical support staff. And the expanding role of cloud and the online services ecosystems that more of us depend on only point up why such IT technical support is more important than ever.

It just so happens that the importance of good and fast support is forcing technical support industry changes, with an emphasis on integration and empowerment for improving how help desks respond and perform in a spiraling crisis.

To learn more about how support is adapting to the high-impact cloud era, BriefingsDirect recently interviewed two lauded IT Master Technologists from HP. Part of the new support philosophy comes from providing a more centralized, efficient, and powerful means of getting all the systems involved working, and all the knowledge necessary together quickly to get applications back in action and keep them there. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

These two support stars, Chris Tinker and Greg Tinker, both HP Master Technologists, who happen to be identical twins, were chosen via a recent sweepstakes hosted by HP to identify favorite customer support personnel. Learn why they gained such recognition, and uncover their recommendations for how IT support should be done better in a rapidly changing era of increasingly hybrid and cloud-modeled computing. The two were interviewed by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

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