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

[Martyn Ranyard]

Quoting Martin Rowe <linux at dbg400.net>:
> Hi folks

Hi Martin,

Sorry about the delayed response, I've been stacked with work + house move things.

> 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.

Will Collingham do? :-)  We do linux servers, firewalls and use it on the
desktop in-house 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 :)

Well, whilst we don't generally install Debian, we have done, and general linux
support should not be IMHO distribution-specific.  I personally am very
impressed with Fedora (it even has apt-get as an option for up2date), although I
have been a slackware devotee for a long time.

> 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.

hmmm... proper training in desktop apps tends to be expensive and I would guess
your best bet locally for any kind of training (linux-wise at least) would be
gbdirect.  The only other training companies I can think of (Azlan, ClearIT
etc.) would be unlikely to be doing OO.o training.

> 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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--
Martyn Ranyard
Development Manager
Synergistic Software
(01937) 573 446
http://www.syn.co.uk/

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