B – Urgent – 2 hour response goal

Significant Problem where production is proceeding, but in a significantly impaired fashion

Time sensitive issue important to long-term productivity, but is not causing an immediate work stoppage.

C – Important – 4 hour response goal

Important issue, but does not have significant current productivity impact for the customer - most common level

Critical issues causing LOB system downtime will follow a defined escalation path to include the development group that wrote the code, if necessary, to create a fix or patch and allow the customer to regain operations. This is the type of response a large commercial software development company can and must provide customers that are running mission critical systems on its operating system.

This highly responsive, effective, escalated support process is not possible with software developed by community effort. Even if the Linux distribution installed is supported by a reputable company such as IBM. The same guaranteed level of support is not possible, since IBM developers did not write the core code and the customer might have added in several addition components to the original distribution to provide the functionality needed. See additional information in section titled “The Truth about Security” about support challenges for Red Hat.