by Gary Sparks
The week began with tutorials by Lauren Radner (UNICOS Kernel Appreciation) and Mark Pagel/Roger Glover (C++). These tutorials, as well as others, continue to be popular at CUG.
Service attendees also actively participated in both the User Services and Operations Special Interest Committee open meetings. These meetings always offer interesting dialog based on "around-the-room" topics discussed by customers in an informal setting.
Tuesday had Stan Pieterick giving a parallel session talk on major disk drive technology advances and their impact on Cray products.
Wednesday featured a general session talk by Mick Dungworth (vice president of Worldwide Customer Service). Mick explained the focus for Worldwide Customer Service for the combined SGI/Cray Research company. He reviewed the key players in his organization and spent a lot of time talking about the key 1997-98 initiatives for Customer Service.
Also on Wednesday, Gary Kadomatsu chaired a general service feedback parallel session. During this session, Gary listened to various issues being experienced from our customers. This session was highly interactive, and Gary left with a lot of good customer input. This session was immediately followed by a talk by Bulent Dervisoglu on the key metrics used by SGI/Cray Research to measure service and the reliability of our products.
Mike Sand gave CRInform impromptu demos and participated in many discussions related to CRInform. CUG continues to provide key input into the future features/direction for CRInform.
Thursday offered the infamous question-and-answer "SGI/CRI Service Panel" moderated by Tom Boyle. Jim Harrell, Dave Thompson, Dave Judd, Steve Oberlin, Doug Olson, Tom Hotle, Dave Kiefer, Jim Sundet, Gary Geissler, and Tom Boyle answered previously collected questions as well as questions from the floor. As usual, this session was very well attended and continues to be one of the more popular parallel sessions.
Ken Meier gave a presentation on Thursday that covered the various tools that the SGI/Cray Research call centers use to help expedite customer calls. This session seemed to stimulate a lot of questions and discussion among the audience. In a later session, Ken also participated on a panel that discussed call center metrics (metrics that are key for measuring the success of a call center).
Of course, there were many other forms of participation by the Service Division. There were many one-on-one conversations with customers and active participation in the numerous Birds of a Feather sessons that sprang up during the conference.
Most would agree, the San Jose conference provided a lot of good interaction and feedback into the SGI/Cray Research Worldwide Customer Service Organization.
