I’ve noticed a growing tend over the last year with companies that are providing exciting new enterprise software, the promise of support and no chance of being able to deliver on it.  And unfortunately, for consumers trying to sort through all the new offerings out there, it can sometimes be difficult to separate all the marketing glitz and glamour from the reality.  With OpenShift, Red Hat is able to stand behind the software that it distributes – they have deep expertise in every layer of the stack.  Given that, it frustrates me when I see others claim the same model without the expertise – that approach is just taking advantage of customers who don’t do their homework before buying.

Let’s think about what would happen if more industries took this same approach – the medical profession for example.  Imagine what the conversation might be after your yearly check-up.

Doctor: Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.  The good news is that you still look okay.  The bad news is that the is something going on under the surface that you are going to want to figure out.

You: Okay… what exactly do you mean by ‘under the surface’?  Also, when you say that ‘I’ will need to figure this out, what do you mean?

Doctor: I mean something is going on underneath your skin.  What happens under there is basically a mystery to us – it’s not something we support.  That said, whatever is going on probably needs to be fixed so you’ll want to find someone that can do that.  We could try but we really don’t have any better odds than you in fixing the problem…

If a conversation like this is so unacceptable in other disciplines, why do we so readily accept it in software?  Let’s take Platform as a Service (PaaS) for example.  PaaS is platform positioned to be the core application foundation in your company.  It is tightly integrated with both the operating system (OS) and your application platforms.  Those that say otherwise are either dreaming or trying to deceive you.  That tight integration is what lets the PaaS platform do things so that you don’t have to.  But many of the PaaS vendors in the market have limited experience across the OS and the application stacks.  In almost all cases, the PaaS providers are going to have to rely on a separate company for the operating system distribution.  In many cases, they are going to have to do the same for the application stacks.

What are these companies going to do when their customers hit issues in area outside of the core PaaS software?  Most of these guys aren’t active in the open source versions of the software so I doubt they are going to do the fixes themselves.  Don’t let them give you the ‘power of open source software’ unless they are involved enough to influence those changes.  Maybe they will proceed with the same awkward conversation as the above example…

Now, maybe these providers have the ability to support all the things they promise.  Maybe they have all the connections in the open source projects to maintain stable distributions themselves.  This is what Red Hat does but I don’t see too many others doing the same.  At a minimum, you should check because you might end up buying a product from a company whose business models is based on you not making that call for help…