One of Australia's most notable Linux adopters, the Department of Veterans' Affairs, (DVA) says that support for Linux was just one of the reasons it selected the open source operating system.
-IBM Australia's support ... was just one of the factors on which DVA based its decision to adopt the operating system," said Tony Ablong, Manager Infrastructure Support and Services Group from DVA's Information Management Unit. While Ablong reserves judgement of support for operational systems - the Department's Linux systems are not yet in production - support to date has at least met industry standards. -DVA considers that the level of support it has received to date is comparable to the support received on other commercial products used by the Department".
Chris Wright, chief technology officer of AusRegistry, says the support his company receives from Oracle is proving satisfactory. The company, which provides domain name registration and web hosting services, runs Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters on Linux and has a support contract covering the database and Red Hat Advanced Server operating system.
But the company does not rely on Oracle for all its Linux support. -Google is all the support you need with the vast user community out there," he says. -Chance are, if there isn't an answer out there, you'll need to find it for yourself." And Wright believes more and more answers will become available as the industry gets behind Linux. -Many users would like the safety of being able to call up a single vendor and say 'Come and fix this.' But with companies like HP, IBM, Oracle and Red Hat getting involved in Linux those kind of reservations aren't valid any more. The support will be there".
Roy Loyzaga, Managing Director of IT services company CommSecure believes that open source software lets his company provide better support for its customers, which include multinational financial institutions and federal government departments.
-One of our rationales for using Linux is that we need to understand exactly how far a solution can go," he says. -We want to be able to support the customer as well as possible. We can do that when we have the source code."
Loyzaga says clients value CommSecure's support for its solutions perhaps more than they value support from vendors. -When we sell to large institutions we sell the solution and our support. The clients are happy with the way we develop the solution and the way we support it. They don't mind what it runs on so long as we give them a service level agreement." And Loyzaga feels the support his company receives from Red Hat and the Linux community is superior to most vendors' support.
-With a closed operating system vendor you get denial first, rather than open communication. If you're not a tier one partner, they tell you to sod off. Even if you are, support takes a couple of weeks." -With Linux, we communicate directly with the people on the team working on that project. Within 48 hours the bug is nailed, repaired and the new system rolled out."
Sydney ISP and system integrator CompuFoxz also finds Linux support more than adequate for its needs. The company's ISP operation serves more than 3000 ASDL customers with an all-Linux infrastructure that also runs its workflow, billing and customer management applications. As a system integrator, the company offers solutions based on Windows and Linux, and finds Red Hat's support for Linux is sometimes superior.
-They are fairly efficient and respond quickly," says Tom Thiel, the company's manager, operations. We've only needed support a few times and they have responded within two to three hours. We've waited more than a week for responses from Microsoft."
Thiel says system integration customers don't worry about support for the operating system, but do demand good front line support from Compufoxz. -They are more concerned about how to maintain their systems than where the software comes from," he says. When customers systems do require support, it is - ... very easy to find solutions, because we have integrated the solution for the client and can access the source code to understand the fix."
