The best software support comes from...Oracle
We in the open-source world like to gloat about how great our support is, and so it is (or can be). But the company that apparently leads the pack in terms of software support is Oracle:
Oracle today announced that Oracle Support has been honored with the "Services Industry Leadership" award by the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA). Oracle is the first recipient of this award and is being recognized for outstanding contributions to driving thought leadership and innovation in the technology services industry and helping to set the standards for delivering world-class customer support.
"Oracle is committed to delivering world class customer support," said Stephen Smith, Executive Director of the SSPA. "Their long-standing focus and dedication to customer success is evidenced both in their world class support offerings as well as their significant contributions to the technical support industry to help drive it forward. It is the latter that we are recognizing them for with the first ever SSPA Services Industry Leadership award."
Well done, Oracle. I guess open source doesn't have all the answers, after all. :-)
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
class support, not actually providing world class support (and open source
software probably wasn't even considered).
One need only be an ORACLE customer / technical user to know that
ORACLE's support outside of sales (closing the deal) is astoundingly bad. For
example, try to find someone in their professional services group that knows
the ins-and-outs of the XML connector or NDM and you're SOL. Adn god-
forbid you buy into the Oracle applications suite... No, there's nothing
particularly notable about ORACLE support.
So, again, while I've heard and told the same stories as you have (and I know a wide range of Oracle customers - including customers who love Oracle - who think its support is trash), Oracle also continues to win awards among its peers. Maybe that's an indication of just how bad support is across the board in enterprise software?