Submitted by “In Red Hat’s case, support plays a central role in the company’s business model and in its high ranking with customers. Brent Fox plays a central role in Red Hat’s organization, helping to ensure the continued happiness of some of Red Hat’s biggest customers. It’s one of those jobs that doesn’t get the attention it deserves… Until something goes wrong. The Open Road caught up with Brent to discover how support at Red Hat supports its customers, and how its model differs from that of other vendors.”
This interview has almost nothing about the tech support business itself.
I am curious how you manage the tech problem and customer satisfaction, when 1) customer can see the source code, and if they have skills, they can debug by themselves at the same time 2) they can read zillions of ‘answers’ (mostly vague or wrong) in forums online.
IT support people working for the average business customer have probably done some Linux training (maybe even the RHCE), know how to do some mid-range system modifications, especially editing configuration files, and how to do Google searches etc to find what help is out there. Most would not be programmers, and therefore the availability of the code is a secondary concern.
The paid support makes its mark when you are dealing with an important or mission-critical server. A company doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for the right answer on to appear on a newsgroup. The admins might be able to do some debugging, but they probably wouldn’t be able to understand a lot of the output without help.
Thus the open source support model is built around timeliness and quality, both of which self-help cannot always provide. Businesses will pay good money for that. Red Hat is consistently rated by businesses as the #1 IT provider in North America, so it must be doing this right a lot of the time.
There is a additional point here. There are two broad categories of support
* hand holding: This level of support you can find usually in online forums. These don’t come with any service level guarantee unlike Red Hat’s support.
* Bug fixes, enhancements, customizations and other level of consultancy services: This level of support you probably can’t find in any online forum easily.
There is also the question of how much expertise anyone single person has over a organization that does a number of major contributors (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions) and has more collective expertise.
To make matters simple, consider this analogy: Would everyone be a mechanic just because they can learn to? Support for Free and open source software is pretty much the same.