[Wylug-discuss] Local companies offering commercial Linux support?

[Martin Rowe]

Hi folks

Who's offering commercial Linux support in this area (specifically
Wetherby)? Reason I ask is that our new IT director is fairly keen to see
where Linux/OSS can benefit the company. He's had lots of IBMers telling
him how he can save money using/switching to it, and he's concerned about
the support angle. Currently I'm the only one at our firm with any Linux
experience, so deploying it more widely (just a PDF print server & CVS
server currently) will require some backup. One of the other lads at work
is interested in learning Linux, but I'd like an external option too.

On a related note, what are the options for commercial support of Debian
systems? Most companies seem to push RedHat, but I'm a Debian devotee,
and I'd prefer to stick with that for an easier life. IBM are backers of
RedHat & SuSE on their platforms, but they don't seem to mention Debian
much. I'm hoping to put Debian on a partition on our new iSeries in the
new year, and it's not an IBM supported distribution, though I know of
people using it successfully. Maybe if UserLinux gets off the ground, IBM
might reconsider :)

In the short term we'll be looking at OpenOffice.org, to see if some of
our users could be using that instead of upgrading to the latest MS
Office. We're still on Office '97 (too old for an upgrade license), and I
understand the cost to move all our Office users to the latest version is
around £90K, so the incentive to switch at least some users is quite big.
The idea will be to give a few users some proper training[1] on
OpenOffice and see how they get on with it from there.

Regards, Martin
[1] I've found at least one company - http://www.burningsuit.co.uk/ -
offering this. Is anyone familiar with others offering OpenOffice
training?
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