Section 6.2. When Is Commercial Open Source Support the Right Choice?

6.2. When Is Commercial Open Source Support the Right Choice?

The models in the previous section provide different ways to bridge the skills gap between IT departments and open source software. This section examines the pros and cons of each support model for IT departments with different skill levels.

Using commercial open source support providers effectively requires many of the same skills IT departments use to evaluate any vendor. An IT department has to understand what kind of support it needs, whether the offered services meet those needs, and whether the company can provide the services when they are needed. However, open source support has different characteristics and provides new choices that IT departments are not used to making. Consider these differences:

• Support for most commercial products comes from one provider: the software vendor. With open source support, however, several vendors might be offering different types of support services.

• Pricing for support will be negotiated much more intensely with open source products than with commercial products. There is no benchmark based on licenses. Customers will be able to cut deals.

• Support offerings will have to be evaluated carefully to determine what services will be provided. Offers will range widely in terms of scope and quality. Some emerging companies might promise levels of support they cannot deliver.

• Support might be used for high-risk periods and dropped when a product is proven stable. After all, with commercial support, you have to pay for updates, but with open source, the stream of updates is always freely available.

• Support might be used as a protective measure while an IT department builds skills.

Companies offering commercial open source support are well aware of all these differences, and they will fashion their offers to provide significant levels of service to clients as well as to protect their position. In the end, these companies are betting that the additional service, convenience, and quality they provide will be of enduring value to their intended customers.

In the next section, we will take a look at some of the most common situations in which commercial open source support is attractive to IT departments.

6.2.1. When Use of Open Source Is Mission Critical

For an IT department, applications that are mission critical, or that have high-performance requirements, must have a high level of support. With open source, this means becoming an expert yourself, engaging a consultant to be available in some way, or using a commercial open source support provider. IT departments at all skill levels will use some combination of these choices. IT departments at the expert or advanced level might have the skills to support an open source product but might prefer to apply those employees to other projects. Expert companies might also want a 24/7 hotline available as part of their operational processes. As systems become less mission critical, the support needs drop and support becomes easier, because downtime is more acceptable.

The problem for mission-critical systems concerns matching the support services offered to the needs of the IT department. This is never easy, even with commercial software where support is offered up and down the stack.

6.2.2. When a Certified Bundle Solves an Important Problem

Certified bundles are collections of open source projects that are packaged by support providers and are tuned to operate optimally with each other for a certain purpose. The initial collections of these bundles are focused on core infrastructure, such as matched sets of complimentary software like the Linux operating system, the MySQL database, the JRun servlet engine, and the Apache Web Server. Where these bundles will go is not clear yet. It is possible that bundles could be created to help build portals, to provide email infrastructure, to support collaboration, and for other purposes. It is possible that these bundles could become the equivalent of supported products and be attractive to an IT department. The key question is whether the bundles will work to solve a problem. The initial bundles are focused on infrastructure and software development support. It remains to be seen at the time of this writing whether other sorts of bundles will emerge and succeed.

6.2.3. When a Consultant Creates a Custom Feature

IT departments often extend open source software to meet specific needs. Experts will do this themselves and will likely support the extensions themselves. IT departments at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels might engage consultants to extend open source and then retain relationships with them to support those extensions. This support might be needed even if the extension finds its way back into the main distribution of the original open source project.

6.2.4. Accelerating Implementation and Building Skills

Services from commercial open source support providers and consultants can be used to accelerate the creation of an open source infrastructure, and to build skills. Systems integrators and consultants offer advice and services to help create strategies and execute pilot projects. Working with such experts can help an IT department to acquire skills quickly.