I love customers

Suppliers on the other hand I have no fondness of. Before you jump to conclusions; no it's not because you make money of customers and bleed money to suppliers... There is more to it than that...

My work has recently started to involve more dealings with suppliers and slightly less interaction with customers. It's an important and probably necessarily change; our company is growing to the point that we need more expertise and help from the outside world. It has unfortunately also thought me a few valuable lessons about why you should not complain about your customers but care for them with great affection. Here's why:

1. Customers educate you, by listening to them you will learn how to evolve your business. Suppliers needs to be educated to understand your needs. And they do not always want to learn.

2. Great customers pick you, but facing potential suppliers you have to pick out the good once from a heap of rotten apples.

One of the most horrendous examples I can think of is the content switch technology we installed last year in our ASP environment. After a few months use we started experiencing really poor performance, affecting thousands of users. It took us several days of support calls, problem solving and sheer agony to discover that the reason behind this was that we had reached a cap of 100 new SSL transactions per second on the content switch. (Which we easily fixed by buying more licenses). What did our supplier do wrong here?

1. They did not educate us on how their hardware calculated the use of SSL transactions so our own calculations ended up far from target.
2. The supplier provided us with no monitoring capability to actually see the status of the current SSL transaction thus living us in a very blind spot.
3. There was a physical cap on the licensing without alarming or logging when the limit for the license was about to be reached.

What if our company billed our customers for a number of licences they couldn't calculate themselves? And had no tools for actually logging the number of licenses used? Or started rejected logins without a warning if a customer reached his/hers maximum number of licenses? We would been seriously bashed by our customers and potentially out of business. F5 on the other hand is one of the worlds leading suppliers of layer seven content switches...