One of the most common questions we get is about how the OpenLogic support model works.  People that hear about it are often curious about how we can provide support for 300+ open source software projects.  I think most people are used to the standard commercial open source support model, where a company owns many or some of the committers for a particular open source package and provides support around it.  This commercial open source model is pretty intuitive since it parallels the “commercial proprietary” world that people are used to.   However, part of the promise of open source is freedom – and we think part of that is freedom is to get support from whomever you feel can best provide it.  That means that there will be choice for customers, and we have to offer our customers a choice that they think is worthwhile.  Otherwise, they won’t buy from us.

What enterprises look for

Our focus is on serving the needs of enterprises.  Most enterprises we talk to are using dozens to hundreds (yes, hundreds) of different open source packages.  Some of those packages go into production, and some are used as part of the development process.  These open source packages are almost never used in isolation – many open source packages are used together, and typically in conjunction with commercial & custom solutions.  What these enterprises want is someone that can support them across many or all of the open source packages we use.

How we support them

That brings us back to the question of how we actually support all of these 300+ open source packages.  The answer is that we don’t do it by ourselves – we use a combination of in-house experts, partners and open source community members.  (See our OpenLogic Expert Community program for more information on that.)  

So how do we do it?  To answer that, let’s look at the type of calls we get. 

• Less than 10% of our calls are software defects.  (Probably anybody familiar with support could have predicted that.)  When we run into a software defect we work closely with the committers on that project to write a fix and check it in.  Our Expert Community includes project committers.

• Many of the issues we get are really “questions.”  We get a lot of questions that involve integration of one or more open source software packages with an in-house or commercial applications.  Almost no open source package is used in isolation, and customers need help getting it all to work together.  We have a lot of expertise with this since our company has been configuring and integrating open source packages since we were first founded. 
   
• We also get some pretty complicated troubleshooting and how to questions.  We work on it no matter what application appears to be the problem.  We answer them through a combination of in-house, partner and Expert Community expertise.  What our customers like is that we work with them until the problem is solved.  Traditional commercial proprietary vendors often try to pass the support “hot potato” as quickly as possible – prove the problem is not in their application and then point the customer at some other vendor.   We take a different approach.  We don’t point fingers.  In fact, we have continued to work issues even after it became clear that the problem was definitely not in the open source package but in some custom code created by the customer.  Our customers love it.  We’ve solved problems involving systems that included open source along with home grown apps and commercial solutions such as BEA WebLogic and Oracle.  When customers express their appreciation at three in the morning, we say it’s the open source way.

Who solves issues

So what percentage of issues do we solve in-house? First off, we make sure that 100% of all customer issues are resolved no matter what open source software package is involved.  We don’t “hand off” the issue so much as we pull in additional resources.  We solve about half of all customer calls with our in-house support staff and the other half we solve with help from our Expert Community – both individual committers and commercial partners.

One of the things I really like about working with our Expert Community is not only do they not point fingers but they jump in to help each other out.   Right after we started doing support, we had a bug in an open source project.  The community member that fixed the bug wasn’t actually a committer, he was just available right away and said “I know how to fix it.”  Within 30 minutes of him posting the fix to our system, another community member that was a committer on that particular project said “I’ve checked it in.”  We are all working in the best interest of the open source software packages and their users.

How do we work with the Expert Community

We pay the Expert Community (both individuals and partner companies) to help us resolve issues The individuals we work with are already committers and contributors on the open source packages they support.  The partners we work with, companies like Covalent, are also experts on the packages they support.  If commercial open source companies do exist, we always try to involve them in our partner program whenever possible.  We think this partnering approach is a “win-win” for everyone –enterprises get consolidated support across the many open source packages they use, OpenLogic can tap existing open source companies to provide that support, and those open source companies receive new revenue streams that we can bring them.

This model has worked extremely well over the sixteen months since we launched it.   We’ve solved hundreds of issues for customers and we’ve paid out money to the Expert Community members and partners who have helped us.  We want to grow the use of open source in the enterprise by providing open source services and tools that companies see as valuable.  We are excited to work with the entire open source community to make that successful.