Product support services consume a large portion of the IT budget for companies of all sizes. Worldwide, spending on software support services represents 16.5% of the amount spent by IT organizations on software according to a Gartner survey done in 2006 ("User Survey Analysis: Infrastructure Support Services Software Base Budget, Worldwide, 2006-2007").

This report provides the details of Oracle's software support portfolio and aspects of its software maintenance and support business.

Insight from this report can be used by software support providers when constructing or revising their support portfolios. Insight from this report can also be used by IT professionals that evaluate, procure and/or manage software support contracts from external service providers (ESPs).

Previous versions of the Gartner Software Support Portfolio Review consisted of two reports to cover two categories of ESPs so that the comparison of the support offerings was on more-equal footing. The two categories were computer hardware OEMs with software support offerings and software publishers. Beginning this year, a separate portfolio review report will be published for each vendor. This series of reports will examine the support portfolios of 33 vendors. See "Report Highlight for Dataquest Insight: Software Support Portfolios, North America, 2007 Update" for links to the other support portfolios that have been published to date.

The trends and analysis revealed in this report provide valuable information to software support service product and marketing managers and to service delivery line managers in ESP organizations. This document addresses the following critical issues:

• What services, customers and markets offer the best opportunities for my business?
• What are the best packaging, pricing and delivery models for the established services portfolio?
• What should I do about market dynamics and competitors that could endanger my business?

This report is also valuable to IT professionals that evaluate, procure and/or manage software support contracts from ESPs.

Overall, the changes from the previous year to this year represent a small net change, but significant shifts occurred within individual vendors. This modicum of change represents a mature, but active, industry, in which vendors are willing to make shifts to better accommodate the needs and wants of their customers. Technology user organizations continue to be under considerable budget pressure, and customers are negotiating hard on the price of their support contracts. In response, support executives are looking for ways to add value to options in their support portfolios.

Support providers alter their portfolios for the following main reasons:

• The need to integrate an acquisition into a new portfolio of offerings to serve the needs of the combined product family and customer base
• Building out the portfolio into a continuum of offerings that better serve the customer base
• Augmenting offerings to add additional features, such as account management, or to serve a focused market, such as mission-critical applications

Compared with the previous portfolio review, Oracle altered its support portfolio as follows:

• It retained its two support offerings from 2006: Oracle Premier Support and Advanced Customer Service.
• Oracle added three new support offerings to support its Linux distribution: Enterprise Linux Network Support, Enterprise Linux Basic Support and Enterprise Linux Premier Support.
• Oracle has added a new support offering to support its Oracle VM product, Oracle VM Premier Support.

Despite Oracle's aggressive acquisitions, it has kept its support portfolio exceptionally lean, adding offerings only to deliver support for Linux and Oracle VM. Based on previous acquisitions, Gartner believes that long-term, Oracle is unlikely to add future offerings related to specific acquisitions.

New players appeared in the 2007 review to cater to new needs in the software support services market. These include companies that provide support services for open-source software and third-party software support providers. By third party, we mean vendors that are not aligned with or partners with the original software publisher.

Software support providers have continued to evolve their support portfolios in response to customer and market demand. The following five areas need continual improvement:

• Focus on total time to resolution. Some vendors are thinking of this, but none have brought offerings to market.

• Develop portfolios so offerings exist that are affordable to small and midsize businesses. This market segment has fewer IT resources to devote to support and cannot afford offerings designed for large enterprises.
• Market portfolio offerings and features so that investments in support of automation technology and integrated incident reporting and response media will see fruition. The lack of such marketing assures that investments will be underutilized.
• As with support automation technologies, support providers must actively communicate the features available from support offerings, especially now, when the user emphasis is on the value of the offering.
• The buyers of support contracts are far less likely to be the same people that use the agreements. This places an additional burden on support providers to find and communicate to the people that are the users of the agreements.

IT support services procured from ESPs continue to consume a large portion of the IT budget. User organizations are advised to inventory their application and infrastructure to determine the scope of users for each software product, the importance to the business and the availability requirements for each software product. Review established support agreements, and apply changes consistently with the importance and availability requirements of each product set.

Software support providers continue to evolve their portfolios of support offerings. Users must be vigilant in understanding what e-support offerings are available from their providers because these deliver more-efficient and more-effective support. These portfolios offer more flexibility and choice than in previous years. Users of software support must study the offerings of their ESPs and determine what level of support offering provides the features they need at a rate that is affordable by the organization.

This series of reports presents the full software support portfolios of software publishers with software support offerings. This report does not attempt to encompass all the software vendors in the market, but the vendors covered do provide a solid representation of the market. This report covers the software support offerings of Linux distribution vendors, independent software support providers, software publishers and independent software vendors. The software support offerings of hardware OEMs with software support offerings will be covered in a separate series of nine reports.

The objectives of this study were to identify and highlight key software support portfolio deliverables that are available from software companies. The following companies were surveyed by the software support portfolio research team:

• Adobe
• Aspect Software
• Avaya
• BEA Systems
• BMC Software
• Callidus Software
• Cisco
• Dell
• EMC
• Fujitsu
• HP
• IBM
• IFS
• Infosys Technologies
• Lawson
• McAfee
• Microsoft
• NEC
• NetSuite
• Novell
• OpenLogic
• Oracle
• Red Hat
• RightNow Technologies
• Rimini Street
• Salesforce.com
• SAP
• SGI
• Software AG
• Sun
• Sybase
• Symantec
• TomorrowNow

At the time of publishing this report, some of these companies may not have completed their submission for the portfolio review.

Support service representatives at each of the companies that provide software support were sent a survey with tables for capturing their company demographics and support portfolios. Results were compiled from each completed survey and from other published resources. The major offerings of these service companies provide a solid representative sampling of software support services available in the industry. In some instances, the companies that responded to the survey did not include every offering or variation they provide.

The survey instruments were primarily two sets of tables: one for company overview information and the other for cataloging the company's support portfolio. Gartner publishes the company overview and support portfolio exactly as received from the vendor and makes only minor formatting changes.

Support offerings are branded services packaged for purchase and subsequent entitlement to delivery of IT software product support. "Branded" means it must be marketed with the seller's name (with consideration of some type of monetary transaction that may include the purchase of a product or a renewal of an established service). "Purchase" means it must be purchased in consideration for a fee; it is not a product guarantee or usability warranty. "Product support" indicates a technology's cumulative knowledge store and dissemination mechanisms regarding defect mediation and usage questions. "Subsequent entitlement to delivery" indicates that, after the transaction, the buyer has the right to access support services.

This section contains a company overview table (Table 1) and the details of Oracle's support offerings (Tables 2 and 3). Table 1 has sections that provide the following:

• The scope of the company's support operations
• The range of products for which support is offered
• Sales and marketing practices for support services
• Policy about software maintenance (software license updates and upgrades)
• Warranty policy

Tables 2 and 3 have sections that provide the following:

• Pricing methods and terms
• Offering coverage and availability
• Vendor response parameters
• Products supported
• Access to support centers
• Incident communication media
• Software updates
• On-site support provisions
• Account management
• Entitled Internet-based services
• On-site professional services (included with the offering)
• Training and education services (included with the offering)