Novell Technical Support Wins Industry, Customer Praise

Novell Technical Support Wins Industry, Customer Praise

Novell technical support has recently been recognized by both customers and leading industry groups for its quality, scope, and timeliness. The Association of Support Professionals has just named Novell as a “Best Web Support” winner for 2007, while the Help Desk Institute has honored Novell with its “Team Excellence Award for External Support.” In addition, an independent customer study indicates that Novell support for Linux bests Red Hat and Oracle in overall quality, timeliness, and addressing the needs of mixed-source IT environments. As a result, Novell customers know they can deploy Novell solutions with the confidence they are backed by one of the leading support organizations in the industry.

“Support is an increasingly important competitive differentiator as the software industry moves to an open source and services-based model,” said Colleen O’Keefe, senior vice president of services for Novell. “Industry validation like these awards for our web and call center support give us the confidence that we’re delivering best-in-class service to our customers. Even more significant, customers, our most important audience, rank us tops in the Linux support business, so we’re succeeding where it it really matters the most.”

The customer study, conducted by independent research firm Lighthouse Research, surveyed existing Novell, Red Hat and Oracle Linux customers to understand their most important support concerns and assess their satisfaction with the Linux technical support they receive. The study looked at a range of support issues, including Linux expertise, timeliness of phone support, how pro-active vendors are on patches and alerts, and the effectiveness of web and self-support options.

The survey also gauged customer opinion on each vendor’s ability to support and maintain a Linux distribution over the long-term, as well as their effectiveness in addressing mixed-platform support challenges. Novell gained top ratings for overall support, and significantly outpaced the other two vendors on both timeliness of phone support and support of mixed platforms, open source and proprietary software. Novell largely matched or exceeded Red Hat and Oracle across all the other issues surveyed. The full report, with methodology and detailed results, is available at http://www.novell.com/linux/support-survey.html.

Read the complete Press Release