IT Vizion, the XHQ specialists
Solution Support and Remote development from the XHQ specialists
It has been just over 18 months since we introduced our remote solution support service for Siemens XHQ and so far it has been a resounding success. Rewind a few years and we found that customers needed help and support that was above and beyond the scope of the traditional Product support offered by Siemens. Typically, an XHQ maintenance license only covers product support. We were receiving lots of calls and requests from our friends and customers in the XHQ community…such as why is this not working, how can we build this, what is wrong with the data source, how do we change this, how do we use this new feature? etc… There was also a need for many customers to reduce costs and many customers were looking to offshore their XHQ support functions. Furthermore, we found that some customers felt that their own staff knew more about XHQ than the general IT support engineers that were somehow responsible for XHQ configuration.
The best fuel for your XHQ solution
So we setup a dedicated XHQ solution support team in our Timisoara delivery centre and brought together a team of Application Support Specialists with both XHQ and project experience. Multi-lingual, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with XHQ test environments to host offline copies of customers XHQ solutions, and backed by a whole team of XHQ engineers and architects with more than 100 combined years of XHQ experience. We also introduced Vizion Watch to continuously scan the XHQ ecosystem to look for emerging issues so that preventive action could be taken before any data issue manifested in front of the end users… More than just a simple XHQ log scanner, Vizion Watch monitors IIS, Oracle, Java and Windows logs and compares emerging issues with an ‘issue” library to provide early warning apparent cause diagnostic. All of this, combined with a dedicated portal for customers to log requests and questions felt like a real step change in XHQ support, all for a reasonable price. So 18 months later and how is the service doing?
Well, within the first few weeks for one customer alone, we identified issues with legacy data collection configuration, tag quality issues in the historian, unused collections that were still running and even a legacy configuration from 2005 that was impacting the performance of the system (Remember to check that property files are also updated in the repos when upgrading to newer versions of XHQ!). What has really helped the support service is knowledge of the data sources and the solutions, helping our engineers to raise preventive action requests and unplanned outages are now a thing of the past. In summary, we feel that the customers are delighted with the service and the end-users are delighted that their critical XHQ system is available all of the time…
