Hyperactive Hyperic

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Open Enterprise Interview: Javier Soltero

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Systematising Systems Management

Last year I wrote a review of the open source systems management sector. At that time, it was highly fragmented, symptomatic of the very early days of this area. The market is still fragmented, but there are some clear tectonic movements going on that hint at important consolidations to come.

First we had Hyperic cosying up to Red Hat:

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Hyperic Inc., the leader in multi-platform, open source systems management, today announced that they have extended their agreement to collaborate on the development of a common systems management platform. Development will continue under an open source model.

For years, the JBoss Operations Network team has been developing code on the Hyperic platform. Red Hat will be contributing its updates and enhancements to this new open source project. Both companies will work to maintain, govern and extend management capabilities within the new open source systems management platform project. Additionally, Hyperic and Red Hat will work jointly to include this base in both future Hyperic and Red Hat systems management products.

Now we have Nagios Enterprises and GroundWork getting luvvy-duvvy:

Nagios Enterprises (www.nagios.com), the commercial arm of Nagios, the world’s most popular open source host, service and network monitoring program, and GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com), the leader in open source IT management software, today announced a joint partnership focused on joint market development and shared delivery of services around open source IT monitoring and management.

...

Under the terms of the joint partnership, Nagios Enterprises will soon offer tier three support for Nagios-related aspects of Groundwork Open Source. In addition, GroundWork Open Source and Nagios Enterprises will engage in various market development activities including cross-promotion via advertising, joint marketing efforts, and business referral opportunities.

It's not really clear how all this going to pan out, but it's seems likely that there will only be one or two main players left in a year or two. My bet is that Red Hat will simply buy up all the companies it needs. As Matthew Aslett pointed out recently, Red Hat is pretty voracious when it comes to swallowing other open source companies.

And whatever happens, I do wonder where this leaves the rather, er, quiescent Open Management Consortium, whose blog last had a posting on 21 May of this year....

Comparisons Are Odorous...

...but useful. Here's a nice analysis of the rather crowded open source systems management sector, with a graph of downloads by month. As the post notes:

The volume of downloads is indicative, like search trends, of the relative mind share for each project. Download volume isn’t a perfect measure, but it is one of the best available. I doubt even the projects themselves have an absolutely accurate idea of how many installations they have.

(Via 451 CAOS Theory.)

Open Solutions Alliance

Another day, another open source organisation:

The Open Solutions Alliance consists of leading companies dedicated to making enterprise-class open source software solutions work together. We help customers put open source solutions to work by enabling application integration, certifying quality solutions, and promoting cooperation among open source developers. Membership is open to organizations that provide high-quality, business-ready open source solutions.

More specifically, it consists of companies like CentricCRM (customer relations management), Hyperic (systems management), JasperSoft (business intelligence) and OpenBravo (enterprise resource management), as well as more general open source players like CollabNet and SpikeSource.

What's striking about these is that together they form pretty much a complete open source enterprise stack of the kind I wrote about half a year ago. This is something we're going to see much more of, as individual open source companies start banding together to present a common front in order to satisfy the demands of large companies who want integrated, working solutions, not a ragtag bunch of codebases.