Strengthening Open Source Support Networks Through Red Hat Exchange

Making customers successful using open source technologies is the mission of open source software vendors. High quality support is crucial to successful long-term relationships between vendors and their customers. However, support is rarely provided in a vacuum and often involves software outside a vendor’s own catalog. Setting up cooperative support agreements with other vendors is a costly exercise that results in documents that are quickly outdated when contact information or escalation procedures change.

Because Red Hat understands the value of collaborative support, Red Hat’s global support organization created the Cooperative Resolution Center (CRC) using a communication infrastructure managed by a third party non-profit group called TSANet (Technical Support Alliance Network). The CRC aims to improve support experiences for customers using software from multiple vendors by streamlining cooperative support efforts.

Today, Red Hat Exchange (RHX) is extending the CRC to its open source partners through a Red Hat-specific partner group at TSANet. The partners joining the CRC are: Alfresco, Colosa, Concursive, Continuent, EnterpriseDB, GroundWork, Hyperic, Ingres, JasperSoft, Likewise, MySQL, Pentaho, Zenoss, Zimbra and Zmanda. Customers purchasing solutions showcased on RHX will get access to coordinated support from the vendor that can best help them.

How does the CRC work? The CRC allows a software vendor to initiate support requests with other CRC members on behalf of joint customers. The TSANet infrastructure maintains the up-to-date contact information and escalation procedures needed to initiate these support requests, without the need for separate cooperative support agreements among vendors.

So today, our RHX customers have access to even better support than before. To learn more about RHX, visit here.