Why the Open Management Consortium Matters

You wouldn't expect something with as grey a name as the Open Management Consortium (OMC) to be hugely important. True, it deals with a crucial area, that of systems and network management. But the real interest lies elsewhere.

For probably the first time, an extensive group of open source companies are consciously joining together to address a new market. To the six original members of the group, many others are being added. Most of these, it is true, are quite small, but some are increasingly well-known names in their own right - for example, Hyperic, which only recently converted to open source.

These moves matter because they suggest that open source is passing to the next level, where individual companies stop acting alone and start working together to offer complete solutions that are otherwise only available from established proprietary behemoths. I predict that this "OMC model" will become increasingly widespread in the world of open source enterprise software.