Dell signs up LinuxCare for support

levanti writes "Looks like Dell will outsource support of their Linux servers to LinuxCare. Article can be found here. "

No necessarily a sign of diehard commitment

[Herschel Cohen]

The Micron box I am writing this on, has third party Windows support, hence, that company has been prepared to make the move to ... Linux!!??

Sorry, too much can be read into too little. However, Dell's past history is a more direct indicator of their intentions.

Time to ramp up the support team.

[Codifex Maximus]

Looks like Silicon Valley is again the place to be right now if you are a support person and are well versed in UNIX/LINUX.

Time to buy stock? The race is on.

No necessarily a sign of diehard commitment

[gavinhall]

Posted by Mephie:

Funny thing is, we have linux expertise in-house, and being based in Austin, there's a lot of people locally that we could pull in to create a dept.
--Mephie

And "we" refers to....

[gavinhall]

Posted by Mephie:

You betcha.
--Mephie

Shameless plug

[Mark Evans]

You guys need to get your name out. I've been hearing about LinuxCare for months now, whereas I didn't know about you guys until recent posts to Slashdot. Or have I been blind, deaf, and dumb. The dumb part is especially likely, although not really relevant.

Good for LinuxCare

[zosima]

I am sure LinuxCare is happy about this. I am glad to hear Linux support agencies getting a boost. I am in college now, so maybe when I get out. . .

What's important is getting Linux out there.

[FireReaper]

Support may be shuffled off to a third party,
which in this case is LinuxCare. However, they
may not have puzzled out how to support Linux. :)

But it is cheaper to hire people are know than to
retrain people in your employment again. Plus,
given that people are trained for windoze, doesn't
seem worthwhile to retrain them to Linux, considering
how expensive those Win-train sessions are.

But the important note is that Linux IS getting
shipped out there. That it get's exposure. So they
buy support from a third party. They are still
offering a token gesture.. even if it does show
just how scared companies are of MS that they
are hedging their bets and not really committing
as much money into the projects.

Seriously though, it is cheaper and easier to have
a third party do the support. Especially when
Linux isn't their expertise.

But then again, who knows.. maybe they are just
screwing around and making claims to get their
stock prices up and make some money without
violating any of their contracts or stepping on
toes. Guess we'll just see, won't we?


- Wing
- Reap the fires of the soul.
- Harvest the passion of life.

Outsourcing.

[mrsam]

Don't forget that IBM also will outsource the support -- to Red Hat.

Shameless plug

[smallworld1]

Linuxcare was even mentioned by Willow Bay on CNN!! You guys really got to get the word out about your company. IMHO, Linux support is possibly the opportunity with the most growth in the entire tech market. I mean how many other service do you have every major company practically begging for.

No necessarily a sign of diehard commitment

[dillon_rinker]

Funny thing, that Gateway outsourcing. They don't outsource support for their corporate clients. Only for the peon clients who don't really matter, except in a collective sense.

Why Not a Linux Business Desktop?

[kmactane]

And business desktops!! for Linux?
[etc.]
I am a Dell skeptic, so let's see if the actions match the words.

Why not Linux business desktops, especially from Dell's point of view? The hardware's no different from the Windoze systems their assembly lines are already set up to churn out (except that they don't really need as much horsepower, since they won't be running MS bloatware). The software to pre-load is significantly cheaper than the stuff they'd license from MS -- they can probably put command-line Linux, any of various GUIs and Corel Office Suite or StarOffice onto the machine for the price of MS Windows or MS Office alone. (If not less.)

Outsourcing the tech support means they really don't have to do much at all to make this work. Most of their overhead for adding the Linux line of Dells is in marketing, inventorying the new SKUs, creating new packaging, and so forth.

Heck, they can even make a little extra by marketing the neato-keen cachet of a Linux business system. If I were a Dell exec, I'd be all over this idea. There's really very little to lose, and a helluva lot to gain.

No necessarily a sign of diehard commitment

[quax]

Outsourcing means that they can discontinue support anytime. It would have been more convincing if they committed an internal division for that support. But at this time they do not seem to think that there is a need for them to acquire Linux expertise in-house.

No necessarily a sign of diehard commitment

[jcj]

If you've been around the industry awhile, you'd know that most outsource support. i.e. for PC's, Dell and Compaq have used Xerox and Banctec...