I am being asked to demo and recommend Orion as a product to another telecom, as well as give some consulting time getting it setup and operational..
So, before I delve into this, there are a couple of issues I need to clear up.
1) Is 9.5 actually ready for deployment, or is the bug list still too large? In my own production environment, I'm looking at waiting until 10.0 SP2 to attempt an upgrade. There are just too many issues, and information about the status of the various issues is fuzzy at best. The information accessibility or lack thereof makes me want to shy away from SW at all for someone getting into it new, but they like what we have so I'm willing to give them what they want.
2) Care and feeding. For ~100 nodes, the care and feeding of Orion shouldn't be that bad if they are on a stable version, but realistically, what should they expect from their staff in terms of hours per week dealing with it?
3) For a new customer, will SW provide and support 9.1? I can't honestly recommend going with 9.5 for anyone at the moment, based on my knowledge of random stuff wrong with it. Again, without clear documentation on both fixed and outstanding issues (there's that customer communication thing again, drat it!), I want to know whether or not the version I know and love is still available.
Peter
