The credativ service and support contract offers professional assistance for many Open Source projects. It is not limited to a single Open Source project or a single Linux distribution.

Open Source is now an important strategy in the IT infrastructure of a large number of businesses but most Open Source software developers are unable to offer an equivalent level of support to commercial vendors. The credativ support system solves this problem and allows companies to choose the best solution for their needs.

The OSSC is the Open Source Support Centre operated by credativ.

credativ support covers a large number of open source projects, including:

 
Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Red Hat, Xandros, Mandriva, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Kolab -Groupware, eGroupware, Asterisk, Apache, Squid, Postfix, Exim, sendmail, Cyrus, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Samba, OpenLDAP, Nagios, DRBD, Keepalived, Amanda, XEN, Gnome and KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox and many more.

credativ has a great deal of experience with Linux and Open Source development and administration within the workplace. credativ developers are active in the development of many Open Source projects and so have the expertise to offer this support. The employees at credativ are among the leading Linux and Open Source specialists in the UK and Germany and enjoy a high level of international recognition.

credativ has been a reliable partner to our customers since 1999 in Germany, and 2004 in the UK. Among the satisfied support customers that credativ has partnered with are Germany?s National Meteorological Service (Deutsche Wetterdienst), leading mobile telephone provider, T-Systems and the federal office for information systems, the federal commission responsible for data protection and the freedom of information, as well as many other businesses and facilities.

You can contact an OSSC employee via:

• Email (A dedicated support email address for your company)
• Telephone (Directly to a technician)
• Ticket-System (By arrangement)

We provide support via:

• Email
• Telephone
• Ticket system
• Remote access
• On site service

The OSSC offers 24 hour service, 365 days a year.*

(* Dependent on support contract)

Normal office hours are 9am ? 5pm, Monday to Friday. All customers have direct access to our specialists: credativ does not use an upstream call centre.

The OSSC normally responds to requests immediately. The maximum reaction time is one hour.

All OSSC customers receive more than just technical support. A unique advantage of our support contracts is the ability to not only use the support time for Open Source support but also for all other services that credativ offers. If your purchased support hours are not completely used, they can be used to pay for the use of other services*, such as optimising the security and quality of your computer systems.

(* You can claim up to 50% of your support time per quarter in exchange for other services offered by credativ)

As an illustration:

An organisation has a credativ support contract with 8 inclusive hours per month. For three months it uses 2 hours of OSSC support per month. Each month 4 hours become available for any service offered by credativ.

In this example 12 hours are available for the quarter and could be used for staff training, maintenance of their Linux servers, for a security check of their systems, or the configuration of a new firewall.

Should a quarter end with hours remaining that have not been used, these unused hours will be used for the assistance and improvement of Open Source projects. Thus your organisation will profit in any case.