Should You Pay for an Open Source Distribution?

Open source – we love it, right? All this information and software available at the click of a button, and even better? It’s free! Who doesn’t love free? It has been estimated that open source software collectively saves businesses around $60 billion a year. These days, for much of the paid for proprietary software solutions, you will find an open source version.

Companies and governments are adopting open source software at rates that would’ve been unthinkable 20 years ago, and a whole new generation of programmers are developing software in plain sight and making it freely available for anyone to use.

The Good News

That’s right, not only can you find solutions at virtually no cost to you, open source is continually evolving in real time as developers add to it and modify it. Because it has so many users poring over it and weeding out problems, open source solutions can be better quality, more secure and less prone to bugs than proprietary systems.

It can be modified to suit whatever your business needs and unlike some proprietary systems, you are not locked into using a particular vendor’s system that will only work with their other systems.

The Bad News

With all this versatile, cutting edge, free stuff out there ripe for the picking – why would you choose anything else? One word: Support.

What happens when your open source solution has an issue and your in-house developers can’t resolve it?  Do you really have the time to spend hours upon hours searching message boards and forums for a fix or waiting for some random programmer to provide an answer for you? And let’s face it, there’s basically no guarantees that your issues will get resolved.

This is where your open source solutions can go awry.  If you can’t get the maintenance, support, or help you need when you need it, how can you use your open source solution in a business critical situation?

The Solution

Wouldn’t it be great to have someone you can call on?  Someone who can jump in and provide the answer you need to get back up and running?

That’s where SUSE can help. With SUSE – you get the best of both worlds! You can have open source solutions your business needs to be innovative.  You can collaborate with community members and tweaki the code to your exact needs.  And, you can also gain access to community blogs, forums and events.  You get all of this, plus the extra bonus of SUSE Support!

SUSE Support is your key to quickly adopting and easily managing enterprise-grade open source solutions with a global partner that is always on, experienced and treats you like family.

Whether you are implementing SUSE solutions for the first time or expanding your IT infrastructure to meet the needs of the digital economy, our holistic approach to support ensures you will get the most of your software solutions.  From hundreds of online articles, blogs, and forums to round-the-clock, follow-the-sun personalized support, the SUSE Support team cares about your business success.

The SUSE Difference

SUSE Support is founded on three key principles.

• Always on

Available when you need help. Contact SUSE Support via phone, web, or chat.  With flexible options, you choose the right level of support to meet your business needs. Or, connect with us online through forums or review the hundreds of knowledgebase articles and documentation that are always on and available.

• Experienced

Building on over 25 years of open source experience, our support engineers have the deep technical expertise to help you minimize and quickly troubleshoot issues.  We regularly collaborate and team with product engineering and the open source community to proactively release multiple security patches every month.  This ensures every SUSE solution is hardened and secure to work in the most demanding IT environments – yours.

• Treats You Like Family

Our support engineers care about your success and are with you every step of the way from logging a new incident to problem resolution – just like family. SUSE Support is transparent, proactive, and will communicate with you openly and honestly until you are satisfied with the resolution.

A SUSE Support Subscription ensures peace-of-mind, providing continued access to updates and service pack upgrades.

When the cost of downtime $5,600 per minute, it’s no wonder why 82% of IT Professionals named downtime and business disruption as their number one concern. Go with a proven open source distribution; go with a SUSE open-source distribution backed by SUSE Support.