I always thought ISG = Inside Sales Group and CSG = Channel Sales Group, but apparently neither are sales related... Still don't know what they are but, why are those groups seemingly always hit so hard?
What did they do to pi-s off the Dell "gods?"
18 replies (most recent on top)
@k9 This is J8. No. Incident Management is 95% Hardware related with all the PowerEdge products to VxRail to PowerStore to PowerMax.
@j8 any incidents with Cyber Recovery?
@et Thanks for hodgepodge of info. First, Dell hasn't made printers since 2016, so that's not a business of CSG. Also, in ISG support, there's a huge Org of Incident Managers, about 60, dealing with escalations, mostly high profile ( I am one, btw). This has been there since 2012 when it was Resolution Management, then Incident Management when EMC's Escalation Management team finally merged with Dell's.
ISG - because ISG can't deliver anything for enterprise solutions in <5 years. And even if and when they do, it has to be pulled back. See x400. Hydra is now x400 4.0.
CSG - market share slowing. No growth. No innovation. Razor thin margins. Commodity hardware.
I am d2, continuing this post as I was on my phone previously.
To explain the losses in ISG, you have to understand where the business used to be. I can only speak specifically to the server department.
Frontline - This just covers support for US and Canada, each of these was 2-6 teams of 15-20 with a dedicated TL and QL (L2s) and a manager.
Triage (Call Directors)
Basic Server
RTMS - Rack/Tower Microsoft
RTMS Solutions - Exchange/SQL, etc.
RTLV - Rack and Tower Linux and Virtualization
Fed Server - Fed Badged employees (took everything)
Modular/Converged - Blade Servers
Chat/Esupport
OLIM - Online Incident Management (bulk incidents, usually simple)
3rd Shift - Collapsed all the above along with some storage and some networking into 2 teams during the hours of 9PM and 6AM CST.
XE - XE is Dell's AI server product line. One frontline team currently.
PSOne - Higher level warranty with lots of rules and customer-specific technicians and leadership. One team currently.
Backline (L3) - Platform and Software also consisted of 2-6 teams per of 15-20 with a two TTLs per team (blended TL/QL) and Manager.
Platform (Hardware) Domain Engineer
Software Domain Engineer
XE Domain Engineers
Above the managers were Directors, then Senior Directors, then VPs.
The following then happened:
Basic went to India (internal) first before being outsourced to Concentrix and CapGemini.
DE went global, requiring less employees.
Chat went to Panama.
TLs and QLs from all teams were collapsed into a single internal chat group. TLs were rebranded either CTE or DRE based on responsibility.
Round Rock and Oklahoma City (where server started) stopped hiring and made a support center in Costa Rica where all new hires supporting RTMS were made. This would eventually expand to other teams too.
Fed and Modular were collapsed into RTLV.
OLIM kinda collapsed adn the volume went to individual teams.
CTE, DRE and QLs (all L2s) were then forced to return to being frontline. 4 QLs remain for business continuity reasons, but that won't last much longer.
Triage largely became automated.
Many Director and Senior Director positions collapsed. Managers below them got the short end of the stick because the remaining directors and senior directors took the manager's direct reports. Any managers who had less than 20-26 employees became an individual contributor one quarter and lost their job the next.
Follow the sun support happened. India is now handling all of English APJ (Asia). EMEA (Europe) and ABU (Americas) are fighting over the remaining hours. Many regional offices were or are closing entirely.
Warranty changes have removed the guarantee of in-region support (which previously prevented ProSupport from being supported out-of-region.)
These jobs used to provide a way to specialize and gave a natural path to the next role (and payscale). With all these consolidations, the technical acumen is the weakest its ever been because the people who are supposed to be technical might never see the same product or software twice their entire career. And where do high-paid roles like Domain Engineers fill their ranks from?
Now it is the slow death of support in the USA as it is getting replaced by India. A former coworker making 80k a year was WFRed so Dell could hire 5 Indians. And no, there's nothing illegal about that in the USA as 49 states are 'at-will' employment.
No offense to India as Dell is simply taking advantage of a society with a lower cost of living and reaping the tax benefits of being a US company while paying Indians a pittance while collecting the difference.
Is AI a factor? Sure, but not as much as you'd think -yet-. NBA/Next Best Action, which is supposed to analyze agent notes and determine the next action is awful. That won't last long though. Once it can read technical output from equipment directly, use previous case history to determine likelihood of success/failure of specific troubleshooting steps, and has a list of 'known failures' and how to fix them, we'll see a major shift in support.
Right now, it is a trickle of a few names every two weeks with bigger ones every 6 months.
As a veteran of L-Dell, the person who said ISG is legacy EMC is very wrong. Infrastructure Solutions Group is Enterprise IT hardware and software support and existed since the early 2000s when the workstation support team split off into a dedicated server support team, which was the first ISG support team.
Dell had server, networking, and storage support teams well before merging with EMC. I was there in 2006 and am still with Dell in a different role today. They supported hardware and software, including VMware, Microsoft server, and enterprise Linux. There were also specialties in areas like exchange, sql, etc.
Most support teams had around 15-20 engineers per team, one quality lead who was like a mini manager (policy focused) and a technical lead (technology focused) that each had their duties. They were managed by a manager, who reported to a director/area manager.
There were teams of l1s, tl and ql above were l2s and your l3s were software and hardware escalation points and specialized in specific topics.
Merging Dell’s ISG and EMC’s ISG meant product support teams like powerscale/isilon, powerflex, vxrail, power protect/data domain are now run through a single vp and a couple senior directors.
There have been management collapses so there are fewer management layers and l2 style support staff, which is where a lot of their losses have come from.
Long story short, ISG has nothing to with Sales. Sales is a revolving door and gets the most attention from the media because they sell stuff, but your 20-30 year vets almost exclusively come from the support space, who makes sure the customer comes back (or at least used to).
CSG is Client Solutions Group, which is a holdover from when Dell originally separated the Consumer space and Business space (which had been called ‘Client’). Consumer and Client remerged during one of the many reorgs 20ish years ago and the CSG name stuck. They deal with laptops, desktops, printers, and have a similar structure to what ISG has.
OP posting inaccurate information and supposedly stating that he can't know everything. You obviously don't know the acronyms so your post is nonsensical.
@cc Probably bots stirring the pot for page views and ad revenue.
@b0 isn't just about everything that is posted on this site. Unless it's a hard fact about a layoff, all the other posts are cr-p and nothing but hate and rage bait. Most by people that don't even work here anymore
This has to be rage bait …🥴🥴🥴
redundancy, long time L-EMC people that have titles of director or above that don't have the skills of an I6
@aj The better question is.. why WOULD I know? I'm in an IT ORG - sorta, but not actually IT.
Sorry for not knowing the billions of acronyms dell has, in which have nothing to do with me nor my org!
@ag wrong client solutions group & infrastructure solutions group
What are you clueless?? You obviously don't work for Dell/EMC.
CSG equates to Customer Service Group. You work at Dell and don’t even know what CSG means.
ISG=legacy EMC CSG=legacy Dell. ISG gets hit so hard because under EMC a lot of resiliency/redundancy was built up. Dell can't stand this and insists on creating single points of failure in the name of efficiency.
LOL those aren’t even remotely what those acronyms stand for!