| Orbit is a Sun Soft
Inc. (Currently Sun Microsystems Inc) project, interfacing
between Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s)
and Sun Engineering. It is a technical answering
center, providing support to Developers, facing
problems during application design and development,
and when porting onto newer versions of the Solaris
Operating Environment. The center also helps developers
migrate applications onto the Sun platforms. Started
in 1992, Orbit has been renewed 7 consecutive times
and is currently in its 8th year of operations.
Orbit is owned, operated and staffed by Wipro.
The primary objective of Sun Soft is to outsource
such a project were the peculiar demands of the
developer community, which cannot be addressed
by the traditional product support centers and
whose requirements are not big enough to be classified
as consulting opportunities. Developer support
while being complex needs a mix of Engineering,
Troubleshooting and Customer Interaction Skills.
The other objectives of Sun Soft were
 |
Reducing
headcount |
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Freeing
Engineering from Developer Support Interrupts |
|
Infrastructure
limitations and Ease of Ramping up/down |
|
Manpower requirements
for running special projects like early access
programs, beta testing, beta support channels
etc. |
Orbit attends to customer queries in the areas
of Solaris Internals, Networking, Graphics, Kernel
core debugging, Developer tools etc. Calls are
received over email, fax and through toll free
numbers. Calls are assigned based on expertise/skill
requirements and logged using a call tracking/management
system. Calls are tracked to closure, Call statistics
like call load, call response time, call closure
duration, call distribution, call spread etc are
reported to Sun.
Because of the nature of developer support problems
and the involvement in developing technologies,
Orbit interfaces with engineering and is the single
point of contact for the developer. Problems in
customer code/application are filtered and solutions
or workarounds given. Problems reported on Sun
products are entered in the engineering bug database
along with test cases and information on simulating
the problem. Depending on the severity of the
problem, Orbit assigns priority and follows up
with the relevant groups for fixes/patches. Patches/Fixes/Workarounds
are screened before being passed out to customers
as solutions.
Access to all engineering databases like source
code, design documentation, Developer tools etc
are provided to Orbit. Orbit has access to Sun’s
internal documentation on FAQ’s (frequently
asked questions), Symptoms and Resolution database,
training manuals, white papers on Developing Technologies
etc. Orbit has access to SWAN (Sun’s Wide
Area Network), making it available all needed
resources over Sun’s Intranet.
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