“Awfully painful but rewarding” should be the title of the last month spent on an HP audit with a Scalable customer. I have learned a few things about doing an audit (and this applies to all audits):

1)   You must (absolutely MUST) be knowledgeable and organized from the beginning. If not you are in for a month long struggle trying to catch up and learn about your subject.

2)   You must (absolutely MUST) know what your product is capable of doing. And have confidence in your product.

3)   You must be patient and earn trust with the customer. They are nervous about 2 things:

1. Can I survive this audit?
2. Can I trust the guy providing the data (see #2 above).

4)   You must have your company backing you the entire way. It helps to have encouraging people back you up at 3am in the morning when you’re lost in data hell.

5)   Oh – and it helps to know Microsoft Excel – and I thought I was an avid Excel user – I was wrong!

A little about the audit (stay with me as this is going to get confusing): HP has hired a big-four consulting firm to conduct a server-based audit at one of our customer sites. Our customer (10,000 employee company – manages over 1,000 servers) has asked us to use our new Asset Vision product to provide the data needed for this audit. I thought, “What a great opportunity to satisfy a customer with a new product and provide an awesome opportunity for our developers in an effort to improve the product.” Now comes the confusing part – here are the details of the HP audit (hope I get this right): In order to satisfy the audit, there are several server side components:

• Windows Servers: They are looking for two components (HP Operations agent and HP Performance agents)
  • But wait – these two components are not always named the same as there are two different versions of each and the name is different depending on the version installed on the server.
  • Non-Windows Servers: They are again looking for the same two components (HP Operations agent and HP Performance agents)
    • Some of the names are HP Operations agent – some are HP Performance agent and some are really wacked out – like HPaV778s (for AIX and Solaris servers).
    • Virtual vs. Physical – they need to know out of the above target servers with HP which ones are Virtual and which ones are Physical. They also need to know which VM machines (having HP installed) are installed on which Physical Machine.
    • Model + CPU count – need both the Model number and CPU count for each server mentioned above (explanation below).

*** The last 2 bullets determine which server tier you’re on with HP (little note on this – HP no longer supports tiered pricing but for those existing customers, you need it to get through this audit).

Now that you think you have all of the components, you still have to deal with customers deadlines (because the auditor doesn’t wait forever), IP ranges,  credentials (both on the Windows and non-Windows side),  and the customer calling you and sending emails all day because they want an update (reference #3 above).

Whenever you have a new product – what better way to improve your product then to throw it into the pool and see if it can swim? With a willing customer, there is no way to lose when you do this. The customer wins because they get the data needed to satisfy the audit (about 98% of it, and the last 2% they can do on their own) and a breathtaking level of support; and the software company wins, because they just spent four weeks succeeding – failing – fixing (several times over) to make the product better (much, much better).