The customer environment is killing support teams. It seems like most of the time is spent scaling the back end of cloud applications. The problem is that most of the support tickets are spent remotely troubleshooting technologies on the customer side. I talk a lot with support teams and the one recurring theme is “if we can’t prove it wasn’t us then it falls on us to fix it anyway”. This pain point is not new. If we step back it makes a ton of sense. As the cloud applications get heavier and heavier (I’m thinking voice, video, Sharepoint, SIP applications etc.) they overload customer grade infrastructure (especially in the SMB market). The assumption is that the end point laptop and all the other mediocre gear will hold up because a lot of the work happens on the cloud side. The reality is that managing endpoints, end users and SMB networks is enough to bring support teams down.