Startup sees market for Linux offshore support

Slash Support Inc., a five-year-old California and Chennai-based startup, has partnered International Business Machines (IBM) to boost offshore support for enterprise users of Linux in the US, Shiva Ramani, Slash's chief executive officer told reporters here on Thursday.

IBM's nascent Linux Competency Centre here will help Slash Support "integrate" the work done by its regional partners in places such as Hyderabad, Cochin and Delhi.

"We like to see ourselves as an advanced technology support team," Ramani says. If more such support becomes available, large companies will spend more on Linux, which offers them better total cost of ownership of IT, he said.

The bulk of Ramani's staff are at three centres in Chennai, where he and two colleagues started the firm some five years ago. "We have been profitable for the last two years," he said, "with gross margins of 60 per cent."

A Mauritius-based venture fund, Barings Private Equity provided one round of funding to Slash Support four years ago, he said.

Worldwide, the Linux support market was anywhere between under a billion dollars and three billion dollars. The guesstimates were made tougher as much of the spending was in-house and other help came free of cost through software posted on the web.

Yet, companies like RedHat, which made money by providing services around Linux, are reporting growing revenues which points to a nascent but growing market for Linux tech support also, he said.

Slash Support enters into service level agreements with customers to provide support at the "interface level and the usage level". So, "if something is not working, we will find a way around it for them... we will not work at the source code level, trying to debug software and so on."

The company will also soon publish a toll-free telephone number where people can call in with request for help with Linux-based software programmes, he said.