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Contents 
Introduction
From zero to support team
Closing the skills gap
The personal approach
And then there's the desktop
A strategy for open source |
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Red Hat isn't the only company whipping Australia's unwashed masses into shape to support the growing flood of local open source users. IT leaders IBM, Sun Microsystems, HP and Oracle are also loudly rattling their open-source sabres, bulking out existing support organisations to offer customers the backing of global support groups with technical experts numbering in the hundreds and thousands. IBM, for its part, has set up a dedicated Linux Technology Centre in Canberra, dedicated to giving more than a dozen Linux boffins a place to apply their skills.
"If customers have an issue with Linux they can call our customer support centre and get help," says Ivan Kladnig, Linux business development manager within IBM's ANZ Software Group. "We are essentially treating Linux as mainstream and as another product within our portfolio, and I've found that support is becoming less and less of an issue for our customers."
Novell, with years of experience in supporting NetWare and expanding open-source credentials courtesy of its recent SuSE Linux buy, has grown its support organisation to more than 30 field engineers and 15 call centre support staff. All have been certified on SuSE Linux, which has given the once-floundering company a new lease on life as a focal point for the open source community.
Providing suitable support for enterprise customers requires a combination of in-house skills, third-party support providers, and even the ability to support competing platforms such as as Red Hat if customers demand, says David Lenz, director of sales and marketing for Novell Asia-Pacific.
"We've got to be realistic," he says. "Customers will be looking for solutions, and they will be looking for the ability to have choice about their infrastructure, and vendors will have to come up with the ability to support these arrangements."
There is a downside to this investment. With top-tier companies snapping up Linux skills, the open source market -- particularly in Australia, with a relatively small population traditionally seen as a centre of excellence to support users in our heavily populated Asian neighbours -- may well struggle to find and keep enough qualified Linux staffers to provide the type of support that's required.
Big vendors may drive the trend towards open source, but they can't own the entire open source services market. Here, as in other markets, it's likely that open source will see a natural grouping of target markets with SMEs and many large businesses establishing long-term support relationships with smaller value-added resellers (VARs). Strong relationships with such VARs are essential for Linux to trickle down into the mass business market, where millions of SMEs represent a significant but elusive opportunity for open source.
Small VARs, however, will struggle to offer the competitive salary packages necessary to lure Linux-philes into the coherent support teams they need. The worrying potential result -- a gap in skills that could leave big customers with most of the big vendors' ear-time, and the rest of the business world relying on patchy support from resource-strained VARs and disorganised online support forums.
To be fair, being small doesn't necessarily mean that a company can't provide good support. A recent independent survey of 185 customers of JBoss, which produces the JBoss open source Java application server, scored the company's support at 5.42 out of 7; larger, proprietary competitors received lower scores including BEA (4.27), IBM (3.96) and Oracle (4.46). That's reassuring to some extent, although it must be remembered that surveys of users are inherently biased because customers only tend to stay customers if they're happy.
IDC has predicted that the overall Asia-Pacific market for support services will grow at nine percent annually through 2008. Despite increasing customer demand, however, the ability to cash in on this market is far from guaranteed.
Whether the Linux community can make it or break it will depend on its ability to pull itself up by its proverbial bootstraps and provide the kind of support corporate customers expect.
User surveys repeatedly suggest open source providers are starting with a strong disadvantage: a January survey of 1000 European software developers sponsored by BEA found that while 60 percent would use open source software in principle, nearly 70 percent were concerned about the updates, maintenance and support accompanying that software. Such caution has typified surveys of enterprise customers since the world learned to spell 'Linux' many years ago and it will be some time before those perceptions go away.
I think this was a pretty negatively-focused article (e.g., starting with a case study of one person's bad experience). It discusses the issue of what are the pitfalls are of linux again and again yet provides little clue as to why people are interested in linux, i.e., the positives in using it. Successes are barely mentioned. What about the horror stories using windows that cause people to leave windows for linux? That is just as relevant to the author's story. And I have heard many horror stories of Microsoft's (and other propietary, non-open source vendor) support. Apache (open-source) is the most widely used web server software out there.