Toni Schneider is announcing the launch of the Automattic Support Network for enterprise-grade support of WordPress and WordPress MU.

Says Toni:

WordPress is already used to power blogs and sites by several well known large companies, places like the New York Times, CNET, and About.com. In talking to other large corporate users over the past few months, I’ve received the same request over and over: if we could pay you to provide us with enterprise level support for WordPress, we’re ready to deploy it in a big way. We’ve responded by creating the Support Network. It’s loosely modelled after similar offerings from companies like MySQL and Red Hat who provide support subscriptions for open source software.

WordPress is our primary platform, and we’ve been talking with Matt & Toni about serving as one of their recommended professional service providers for integration, development, marketing support and other types of professional services that are adjuncts to the core platform support Automattic will focus on. We are also moving ahead on integrating white-label versions of some of the Big in Japan apps (PodServe, primarily), which we think are an ideal complement to extensible platforms like WordPress.

Check out what the Support Network has to offer.

Update:  Marshall weighs in at TechCrunch.