Why Enterprises Need and Value Pre-Paid Technical Open Source Software Support
Pre-paying for open source software technical support and consultative expertise might sound crazy to some of our readers, but it should sound like a very smart and safe business decision. As an industry indicator of the growing need for commercial support on open source software OpenLogic’s support team saw a 39% increase from 2010 to 2011 in the total number of support incidents submitted during the last calendar year.
I have the pleasure of working with many different client organizations to help them determine if, when and what service level of commercial open source support is right for them. Every time we discuss the options our conversation is a little different from the last, and rightfully so. Evaluating the organizational need for open source technical support depends significantly on where, how, why and when the open source is going to be used. These considerations all most likely revolve around some amount of a formalized open source strategy or open source software policy.
Just about anyone these days will echo the comment, “Nothing is ever really, truly free anymore.” If you agree with this statement to some extent, the rest of this article will summarize a few key reasons why OpenLogic’s enterprise customers purchase (and continue to renew) a subscription for pre-paid support and/or consulting.
Confidence in the Support Provider Through Service Level Agreements (SLA’s)
The OpenLogic technical support team expertise has been built up over the last 11+ years to provide industry leading SLA’s that compliment both production and non-production environments. It goes without saying that enterprises have their own in-house expertise in the form of DBA’s, system admins, architecture teams, etc. If open source software system set-up, configurations, troubleshooting, problem solving and issue resolution are 115% core competencies of the in-house experts, then it would be safe to rely on those team members. However, in a more realistic scenario, these are not 115% core competencies of an in-house team and a third party will eventually be required to help provide support. Ideally that third party would offer SLA’s with guaranteed response and resolution times like OpenLogic.
Choice and Flexibility
OpenLogic aggregates support on hundreds of different community versions of open source software products under a variety of SLA’s. This depth of support available is (to the best of my knowledge) unmatched anywhere in the world. Enterprises that are just starting to use open source typically begin working with OpenLogic for support on one or two products and continue working with us because they have confidence we can help them develop a success strategy for other critical aspects of using open source. The OpenLogic Expert Community and Expert Partners provide an anonymous relationship for our customers to have a direct channel of commercial communication with top committers and contributors to the most widely used enterprise-grade open source products.
It’s Pre-Paid!
This one might sound like a stretch given the state of our global economy where budgets are extremely tight or in some cases completely frozen, but please bear with me. True story: I’m filling in for one of our technical experts on blogging duties this week because he’s booked on consulting engagements for two weeks straight. A client of mine came to us recently with multiple mission-critical issues identified in a major open source product that were affecting its customers. Realistically it takes some time to cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s in any legitimate support and services contract related to mission critical technology systems. Had this client contacted us weeks, months, or years before the mission-critical failure to begin the contract revision process we could have been completing the diagnosis and resolution of the issue during the holiday weeks instead of pushing through last minute paperwork. Hindsight is obviously 20/20 and no one can accurately predict when a system will come crashing down in production, but if and when it does crash having a 24×7 SLA support contract backing up the open source environment ensures that an expert will be able to bring it back up very quickly! (Yes, even during the holidays).
The critical nature of open source software support doesn’t have time to wait for procurement cycles to complete. The team here is backed by a global network of expertise – they are literally are some of the best in the world who write the code you are most likely already using.
Hopefully this article and the growth of our new blog continues to dispel some of the remaining FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) in the industry and will show organizations there are very realistic alternatives to the status quo of only using open source based on availability of in-house expertise or a commercially available license for the product. By forging long-term partnerships with OpenLogic, our customers save time and money (potentially lots of it depending on the size of an environment). In some cases we just might even help reduce the stress-level of the in-house system administrators and DBA’s day-to-day lives.
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