The South East Asia SOA Weblog

Thanks for information!

Hey no problem. Another thing to be aware of is escalating support licensing costs. This typically happens when you seek to provide tier 2 support for a series of products to fulfill a complete SOA footprint. Often these costs escalate to a similar level to that provided by commercial vendors (other than the once off up front licensing cost). The value of some of these support licenses (as with tier 2 support provided by commercial software vendors) is dubious at best given that most support is completely dependent on tier 1 anyway (i.e. the systems integrator or internal IT staff).

I think tier 2 support is definitely warranted for some of the more complex solutions such as ESB, especially for the initial term until the teams gain more product depth, but a better long term solution is to work closely with an SI to leverage their capability to deliver tier 1 support that also incorporate some days-on-site support. Given that most of the tier 2 support is delivered remotely over the internet using issue management systems such as Jira etc. there is only so much they can deliver anyway. Thus (as with commercial products) it is critical to have a very capable tier 1 support capability delivered by an SI with specific skills in the product set deployed.