None of us in the Software support community take any pleasure from outages – even to competitors. As a profession, we are all diminished a little when a team of fellow professionals is hit by unforeseen events whether a tsunami or a hardware failure and the spotlight falls on the difficulties of our profession.

However, being support engineers at heart, we all do have a detached professional interest, in fact a duty, to learn what we can from the travails of others. The technical details of the two day outage for some Blackberry services are not something I could or would comment on.

Part of HP Software Support’s Exceed Expectations philosophy is to quietly and continuously improve the way we support you. We hope the effect is that customers will realise, almost without noticing, that our service levels have risen to be the best in the industry.

One of the key process improvements we introduced in the last 12 months though was a working practice for our support engineers that we call ‘Touch and Hold’...