Support Options for Open Source Products

For speciific offerings please refer to the products themselves. The following is a general approach offered by OCI.

24 by 7 SLA: Many corporations with mission critical production systems are required to carry, as a back-up to their own IT staff, a service level agreement (SLA) with 24 hour coverage from a knowledgeable provider. OCI provides such services for many of our open source products. This often requires a mutual agreement on the version and platforms to be supported. That version must always be identical to the one also available to OCI. This ensures there is no confusion during time critical requests for support. The fee model includes a fixed price per month to ensure there are sufficient hours for OCI to track, build and maintain the open source version in synch with the client needs. The client may elect to use that fixed rate and its associated hours for any software service such as porting, new features, investigations etc. Hours that fall outside the fixed number per month are invoiced at the usual hourly support rate.

Priority based: This level of service provides priority support at a fixed price per quarter for a given number of hours. The priority level support is only provided during normal business hours, which are 8am to 5pm US Central time. Hours that fall outside the fixed number per month are invoiced at the usual hourly support rate.

Ad Hoc: This level of service is designated as best effort. Clients with a current purchase order (PO) in place, and a signed professional services agreement (PSA) may submit support requests up the financial limits of the purchase order. OCI invices only for time used.

For emergency help OCI can offer some initial support with payment made via PayPal.

OCI also has an office in Arizona (Mountain Time). So normal business hours can be an extended day. Also OCI staff monitor support request traffic continuously. In some instances support will be rendered outside normal business hours, such as early morning and late night. When working with a client, via email, in a different time zone, this can speed up turnaround time. Note though this service is not guaranteed except for 24 by 7 clients.