March 24, 1999

Hughes Software Systems (HSS), India's #1 communications software company, has decided to offer online support to the Linux user community in India and abroad.

HSS will provide free support to Linux users over electronic mail (email) and phone, seven days a week, 24 hours a day through its '7X24 Free Support Program'. Dedicated telesupport will be available at +91-124-346666, extn.2929 at its Gurgaon facility. Email support will be provided through penguins@hssworld.com. '7X24' (Seven cross twenty four), seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, is an HSS support philosophy that has now been extended to the Free Support Program for Linux.

Launching the '7X24 Free Support Program', Mr Vinod Sood, Assistant Vice President, Head of Engineering, HSS, said, "We have decided to offer this free service in view of the tremendous interest generated among users in India and abroad who have started working with this open source operating system." Currently, there are an estimated 50 million users worldwide. The Indian user community is also growing very rapidly.

HSS, a subsidiary of USD 1.2 billion Hughes Network Systems (HNS) based in Maryland, USA, has 3000 person years of cumulative experience on Linux and Linux-based software development and applications. Since its inception in 1992, HSS has used Linux as the development platform of choice. An HSS analysis of competing operating systems, at that point of time, had rated the open source operating system the highest on parameters of flexibility, richness of features and robustness.

"HSS has a large base of more than 600 professionals who have unmatched expertise on Linux. Over the last six years we have used and supported Linux informally within the IT developer community. With the emerging interest of Small Office Home Office users in this open source operating system, we have decided to extend our online support to Linux users across industry," said Vinod Sood.

The benefits of Linux as a tool for software development and as an operating system of choice emerges out of its rich feature set and ease in application development. The system provides an open source code and free use of third party tools developed by users and developers across the globe. All this helps in speeding up software development schedules and allows users easy portability on to their choice of operating system.

Last updated : February 2, 2004