| How Red Hat does support |
Nov. 09, 2006
Oracle, with its recent claims to be able to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux under the name Unbreakable Linux better than Red Hat does, has a hard road ahead of it. Behind Red Hat's support network is a large, well-trained organization.
Iain Gray, Red Hat's senior director of global support, explained that Red Hat offers 24x7 support around the world using a "follow the sun model." By this, he means that Red Hat maintains technical support centers around the world.
The company's primary technical support centers are in Raleigh NC, Brisbane Australia, Guildford England, and Pune India. In each of these main centers, support up to and including level 3 is supplied. All together, Red Hat has support centers in twelve countries with help available in eleven different languages.
So, Red Hat's follow the sun support works like this. If you're in Japan and you call about an RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) problem, your call is most likely to be answered by a native Japanese speaker either in Japan or in Red Hat's Brisbane center. The one thing, according to Gray, that they will all have in common is that every front line support person is a RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer).
All together, Red Hat currently employs over 200 RHCEs in support. The support operation itself is actually larger than that, since the 200 doesn't include the support staff's support staff or back-line engineers.
Gray goes on to explain that while Red Hat has the usual "tiered support -- tier 1, 2, and 3 -- we try to push as much technical expertise as possible into levels 1 and 2. That's so that we can try to solve our customer problems at the first interaction."
It seems to work. According to Gray, "97 percent of all problems are resolved by the first line of support." Typically, Red Hat deals with approximately, "7,000 issues per month."
Gray continued, "24x7, though, is taken as a given. What customers really want to know is can you support the whole environment where Linux is the part of the package."
"I think there are two areas that our customers really appreciate in our support. The first is that we are experts on our own technology. Most of our customers know how to find Linux support online, so when they come to us they're looking for higher level of expertise and we deliver it."
"The second is how well we interact with our other partners in the overall IT ecosystem. As Linux adoption is driven deeper into datacenter, we never forget that we're not working in a vacuum. We need to work with Oracle, Sybase, EMC, and so on. When customers come to us they're, looking for a single throat to choke for support, and we try to deliver the goods," he added.
Red Hat does that by maintaining close technical engineering and support relationships with its partners. That way, when a customer calls with a problem, Red Hat, and not the customer, can reach the appropriate people at the other vendor to resolve a problem.
This isn't just a reactive mechanism though, it's also proactive. Gray explained, "We make sure we talk with other partners in the Linux ecosystem. For example, we had a situation over this weekend with a hardware partner in Japan. I've been in touch with my counterpart to make sure we're synced up to solve any potential problems."
Red Hat surveys its customers after each closed ticket to make sure that the job was done right, according to Gray. In addition, surveys are taken of users with technical support accounts every quarter.
On top of that, Red Hat has a customer advisory board. This board, Gray explained, "Does not look at how well did we do, but what are new ways customers would like to see us deliver service. For example, he continued, "We have a new maintenance model where customers stay on each release of RHEL for longer which includes bug fixes and new hardware enablement."
Another small example of this is that Red Hat releases a major update to its Linux every four months. The naming convention has been RHEL 4 Update 1, RHEL 4 Update 2, and so on. However, that is not what the customers wanted, so Red Hat will be moving to the industry standard convention of RHEL 4.1, 4.2, and so on.
Oracle has also claimed that Red Hat doesn't support its Linux for long enough. Gray begs to disagree, saying that "RHEL 3 and 4 are still being covered Red Hat gives each operating system a 7-year maintenance cycle. In that cycle, three to four releases will overlap."
And, yes, even though Oracle is at odds with Red Hat, "We continue to work with Oracle with joint customers. We maintain a partner technical account manager who can deliver level 3 support just for Oracle in addition to backline support."
After all, while Oracle may not be the best partner in the world, they're still a Red Hat customer.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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