eCosCentric's support services provide comprehensive engineering support for all eCosPro-based development projects. The support services have been formulated to provide the quality, responsiveness and features that you need - helping to ensure the ultimate success of your project.

The full range of support services are available for eCosPro Developer's Kits on standard target platforms, and for eCosPro releases for custom hardware delivered by eCosCentric under development contracts. Examples of all standard and custom target platforms are retained within eCosCentric's test farm facility to enable our engineers to quickly reproduce, debug, resolve, and regression test any reported issues. Note that eCosPro Starter Kit users need to upgrade to a full Developer's Kit for provision of support services, and that for non-eCosPro based eCos projects we can only offer Advice Line support.

eCosPro and associated support packages are delivered on per-company department and site basis. There are no per-seat limitations. Any number of engineers within a department, at a given site, may benefit from the support services. Support packages can be tailored to suit project size, budget and timescale, and cover detailed technical advice as well as problem resolution. All support requests are rapidly responded to within a defined guaranteed turnaround period.

Your support package is made up from two distinct types of support services: Incident Support - problem investigation and resolution, including patch generation where required, and Advice Line - technical advice on any eCos, RedBoot, or host tools issue.

These are ticket based services, where each incident reported, and each topic of advice requested consumes one ticket of that type. Tickets are valid for a defined period after which time they expire. There are a number of standard packages for eCosPro Developer's Kits that cover a range of durations and incorporate different ticket allocations for each support type. Alternatively the number of tickets and the period they are valid for can be tailored to suit your specific projects needs. For very large projects and teams there is an Unlimited Support option for complete coverage with no limit to the number of support requests.

Incident Support

The Incident Support service enables you to report "incidents" to eCosCentric. An incident is defined as a problem report regarding errant behaviour or coding of eCosPro run-time components, RedBoot, or the eCos host tools. Reported incidents will be investigated and resolved by eCosCentric engineers. Where necessary, source level patches will be written, tested, and delivered to fix the reported issue. Windows and Linux hosted development environments are supported, and eCosPro installation support is also included.

Incidents are handled via eCosCentric's Bugzilla-based bug tracking system. This provides a standard web and email-based mechanism for all incident reporting, responses, status tracking, and searching. The system allows access to both public and your own confidential reports. There are no developer seat limits, but developers need to be registered on the problem reporting system in order to issue and track confidential problem reports.

At our discretion, trivial incidents will be fixed gratis and will not be included in the incident allocation. Problem reports which include suitable patches for which only verification of the patch is required, or reports regarding documentation, are not classified as incidents.

Incident Support is normally combined with Advice Line Support to provide a comprehensive support package for eCosPro.

Advice Line

Whether you are a single person company or a multinational development team, Advice Line provides engineers with direct access to in-depth eCos knowledge and experitize. It is ideally suited for embedded developers that require professional, competent, confidential responses within a guaranteed time frame.

Advice Line requests are posted through the same Bugzilla-based system as Incident reports. This enables straightforward access by anyone on your team to post new queries, track and partake in the discussions on existing queries, and to review old queries and responses. Queries are responded to by highly skilled and experienced eCosCentric engineers. Answers and advice are provided within one working day of requests being posted.

Advice Line is restricted to answers and advice on the use of eCos, RedBoot and the host development tools. It does not cover in-depth investigation, resolution and generation of patches to resolve problems. The Advice Line service can however provide patches for problems that are already known and have already been resolved. If you are experiencing problems within eCos or RedBoot that require patches, you need to include the Incident Support service within your support package.

While we find that this service fits most customer requirements, it may be optionally extended to include telephone escalation support for customers who also require a rapid turnaround of advice and answers.

Unlimited Support

Unlimited support is ideal for larger development teams and for users that require the ultimate level of support. Unlimited support combines Incident and Advice Line services, and removes the restriction on the number of issues that may be raised. It is provided for a fixed number of developers (in increments of 10) over a defined time period. Coverage includes all eCosPro run-time components, RedBoot, as well as the eCos host tools for either Windows or Linux. eCosPro installation support is also included.

For more information on our support services please contact us for a detailed discussion.