"We go over all of the factors, everything we have done to monitor and track the issue, and inform them that we believe there may be a flaw in their product," says fish.

"The engineers from the vendor completely avoid our hypothesis and come up with one of their own: Our network switches, for some reason, are choosing to drop just their packets and are thus causing the problem.

"Their solution: Replace all of the switches.

"The silence in our conference room is deafening. Then we tell them we'll take that under advisement, and end the call.

"Two weeks later, there's a new release of their client software. We distribute it to users. Suddenly all of our problems cease.