We recently held an outsourced sales organization develop and deploy a SharePoint portal for tracking leads, customer calls, notes, and other important client data.
The users are spread through the US so it made sense to go with a hosted SharePoint platform. We chose a hosting organization that we had worked with many times over and been very successful with in the past.
Then they were acquired by Dell.
In the past 2 months, our mutual customer has experienced 2 major outages. The first was for 4 hours and the second was for 24 hours.
Both times, service was restored but there was no communication from Dell. Nothing. No estimated time of restore, no explanation of who was impacted, no explanation of why it happened.
Further, our mutual customer sent several emails that just weren't answered.
You might ask - "Why didn't he call someone?". There is no number listed for support - email only.
Clearly no business is perfect - but we are all defined by how well we handle potentially disruptive situations. This customer has asked us to help them find another hosting provider.
We're happy to help.