By Matthew Sacks

One aspect often overlooked when purchasing an enterprise software product is: How does a vendor’s support channel perform.  This is a critical aspect of any software purchase and something that many companies and individuals do not receive and answer to until they are under pressure to fix something because the business is being negatively impacted and reliance on the software vendor becomes critical. It is quite difficult to measure the quality of a software vendor’s support channel when purchasing software. This article describes some of the ways to better evaluate a software vendor’s commercial support before purchasing to make more informed decisions and avoid some of the pitfalls when purchasing software support.

Software support can be overlooked when evaluating a software product.  Mainly because the purchaser does not get any insight into the performance of the Venodr’s support channel until they have already purchased the product. Or even during pre-sales support when the customer was evaluating the product they received exceptional support, but came to find out that the pre-sales support was quite different from the regular support channels.

Many purchasers of enterprise software assume that support is something that will automatically meet their support needs when purchasing a product because they are entering into a binding legal contract, and the company is reputable But often, the vendor may say they cannot help troubleshoot or fix their product, and will not escalate an issue to the necessary backline support because they do not believe the problem to meet the criteria of even getting to their internal engineering team, and when experiencing the more difficult problems this is the only group with an answer to your problem.

An Example Case

The following example models no specific company, but presents and example case that a company might experience when calling on their commercial software support contract. It is completely fictitious, but represents a potential real world case that has occurred in my experience.

Lets take Vendor X, for example. Vendor X sells software for improving Web site performance to Company Z Company Z implements the application on their Linux operating system and everything is humming along fine until one day, you need to upgrade your operating system version. The application begins to perform terribly and you get a response from Vendor X requesting log files.  Weeks pass and Vendor X comes back requesting log files, which have previously been sent, and cannot seem to locate them. Vendor X promises that they will investigate the issue; however, nothing seems to be getting done by Vendor X, and even worse, they are not keeping good track of the information provided to them to resolve the problem.

In such cases, which are not uncommon, the support contract becomes a legal agreement and ceases to be a promise to assist the customer in fixing the software and support policy (which often is paid in addition to the software) which they sold to them.

Guidelines for Evaluating Commercial or Third Party Software Support

The following questions to ask when evaluating commercial, third party, or self-support for a software product:

1) Response time: How fast does the vendor respond to commercial support?
For open source based projects: OSS Watch has already created some great guidelines for selecting a project: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/tips.xml

2) Backline Engineering: Often times, the only individuals who have a valid solution to a problem are those that wrote or maintain the software. In such cases, the following guiding questions might be asked:

Does the vendor contact their internal development teams when you need code-level analysis, such as investigating a bug? And is it difficult to receive such support when the request is valid to escalate to backline engineering?

3) Commercial variants of open source projects: How widely adopted is the project?

4) In house skills: If I intend to go purely open source without a support contract: Are my employees well trained enough that they can engineer their own fixes without the assistance of a commercial support channel?

5) Documentation: Do books exist on the software technology?

Is the documentation quality or is it difficult to read?

Is documentation on the software technology available?

7) Bug fixes: How long does it take them to provide a bug fix? Some vendors can take about a year to provide a bug fix, and by then you have either gone with a different software model or found a workaround yourself.

8) Legal: Do I meet the requirements to be in compliance with my vendor’s written technical support policy? In many cases the software vendor is not required to provide support even if it is paid for, if the support contract holder does not meet the requirements laid out in the legal policy

9) Software Updates: How often are bug fixes and updates produced?

10) Feature requests: Does the software vendor take feedback on feature requests?

11) Is the software supported on Virtualization technologies?
Many software vendors will not support a product if it is running on a virtual infrastructure such as Xen, VMware, or Microsoft Virtual Server. Many organizations are deploying software on Virtual technologies, and in many instances a software vendor will not support a technology on a virtual platform.

12) Do they have different levels of support? Typically vendors that allow one to choose from various support levels provide a better quality of support because they can create more responsive Service Level Agreements because the customer is paying more or less depending on their specific needs.

Alternatives to Commercial Software Support

Every organization’s needs are different, and depending on the technical culture and needs of the organization the answers to these questions will vary.

The alternatives to commercial support are doing a professional services engagement, hiring your own contractor who is a domain expert, or working around it with a temporary solution.

By hiring a contractor the immediate needs are met during emergencies, and the on-staff team is expected to maintain the software in most cases, provided they are qualified. In many cases a professional services engagement with the commercial software vendor can be cheaper than maintaining a software support contract. Many commercial software vendors require the engager to have a valid support contract to be eligible for support.

One of the advantages of paid commercial software support is that often times, one needs to send proprietary, sensitive information for assistance in troubleshooting a problem. This is difficult to do when dealing with community forums or a mailing list. The quality of support also varies depending on the vendor, how long the product has been around, and how widely adopted it is.  Commercial software support has many advantages as well, such as dedicated SLA’s, legal protections, and often times faster bug fixes. This article hopefully has given a clear picture

If a company that dedicated resources to fixing a vendor’s software product, or do not have that knowledge in-house, then you will probably need commercial software support. Even with many modern open source software projects, there is a need for official support contracts to uphold SLA’s for the business, and to fix bugs in the code.  I hope this article has presented the reader some of the ways to better evaluate commercial software support before purchasing it, or perhaps going open source depending on the needs of the business.