I started my career as a mainframe engineer as a resident engineer at the customer data center providing 24×7 support. Those days were of centralized computing and the mainframe was the single point of failure for the organization and hence the engineers supporting them had to be on their toes, should there be any outage. We couldn’t do without having engineers onsite, keeping spares onsite and have an escalation path to ensure system stays up as there would be many people who would have to sit idle if there was any outage. Customer service /satisfaction depended on the up-time, how knowledgeable the engineer who managed the systems was and the escalation efficiency. From customer management perspective, there was a team dedicated to serve this customer who managed day to day activities.
We then moved towards distributed computing where the mainframes got replaced by client/server architecture (LAN, minis / mid-range systems). Delivery model also transformed to match the distributed nature of the support. Engineers could sit in office and visit multiple customers in a single day. Customer service / satisfaction depended on transactions (service requests) , rather than holistic view of the complete service delivery since the impact of the issues wasn’t significant and there would only be partial outage as seen holistically.
With the cloud computing, we are again moving back to the consolidated (converged) infrastructure where data centers are being consolidated into one big data center which houses all the infrastructure to set up the cloud. As we take huge strides towards this model, we are moving back to the good old centralized computing days but with a difference. From customer management perspective, we are again going towards the old model where we have a dedicated team that will need to take care of the customer.
The difference in this new model which we are heading towards is that there are more challenges due to the changes in requirements and onus is again going to find people who would have both technical and soft skills to be able to manage the customer pressure during the times of outages. The support personnel will need to acquire skills from multiple technical domains to understand the big picture of the cloud solution.
Note: While cloud computing is the buzz word, I agree that there will always be a legacy of client/server computing left, as we still have mid-range systems and mainframes around.