What is your real support level?
A lot of times I hear “don’t worry, we have support for product X” when talking to customers and I find a lot of people consider the ability to get support for a product to be more of a yes/no checkbox versus a what I feel tends to be more a continuum.
To start off with, I’d like to layout my primary definition of product support as “the ability to resolve problems encountered with the product”. I know some people may add “the ability to get new versions”, but I’m putting that to the side for now, since that isn’t a very nuanced problem (essentially solved with $ alone for a support agreement if commercial-only software). I also know some people just use support as “someone to blame so I can slip out of all responsibility despite my job”, but I’ll be ignoring those folks.
For hardware products where you might need to get a replacement for failing disks, motherboards, etc, having support can certainly be a yes/no type answer (although another option might be just buying some extra components that you know are likely need replacing).
For software, besides the standard vendor support contracts available, I think of the following aspects of support:
- internal employees/contractors – their knowledge of the overall problem space as well as the specific products used.
- software maturity – the important thing here isn’t just how long it has been around, but how widely used is the functionality you want to implement.
- platform choice – this doesn’t matter for some generic Java services, but if the product is a compiled program that interacts with the operating system a lot, make sure there are enough other customers using the same operating system as you. I’ve seen cases where a product was extremely widely used, but if you were one of the handful running the product on an unpopular platform (e.g. AIX), your chance of having an undiscovered problem and your time to problem resolution was on average much higher than if you were using one of the more popular platforms. If you can’t find much evidence of people running a product on your platform of choice, consider choosing a different product or if the specific product is key to your organization, consider running it on the vendor’s platform of choice.
- community – are there active mailing lists/forums/blogs/irc channels for people using this product?
- documentation (both official and unofficial) – how comprehensive in breadth and depth?
- boutique consultants – smaller organizations like Percona (MySQL) or people like Richard Elling (ZFS/Storage) may be able to provide expert assistance in a targeted and quick manner, often going much deeper than typical vendor support and much faster to engage than larger professional service organizations
I think your real support level is made up by all the factors above and they should be considered when evaluating a product’s overall suitability for your organization, don’t think of it just as a checkbox.