The evolving systems management ecosystem
In mid-April, Qlusters Inc., opted to drop its sponsorship of the openQRM project, an open source provisioning and monitoring tool. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of data center management products and services handed over openQRM to the open source folks at SourceForge where the project will reportedly continue under the tutelage of project manager Matt Rechenburg. In a subsequent blog post, Matthew Aslett, an enterprise software analyst at the 451 Group speculates on the fate of Qlusters, wondering whether the OpenQRM announcement signals the demise of the “little four” group of open source systems management vendors.
Could GroundWork, Hyperic and Zenoss possibly be on the verge of quietly disengaging from the world of open source systems management?
The folks at GroundWork took enough exception to Aslett’s post to contact me and give me their perspective. “Going with one of the big four, or going with one of the open source vendors isn’t an either or choice,” said David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at GroundWork. In terms of systems management tools, “there are alternatives from smaller vendors that are displacing or complementing specific pieces of what the big vendors offer,” he said. “What we see is a melding of the offerings from smaller vendors with big vendors.”
Andi Mann, an analyst with the Enterprise Management Group has long been a proponent of an ecosystem of systems management providers, believing that no single vendor can provide all the capabilities required by most customers. And vendors both big and small seem to share this perspective if a few timely announcements are any indication.
Just this week, Netuitive Inc., a provider of performance management software announced integrations with systems management tool HP OpenView with the idea of enabling an end-to-end view into the health of business service management. And big four vendor CA has teamed up with process automation company Opalis Software in an OEM agreement designed to overlay a process automation layer on top of CA’s data center tools for change, control and configuration management.
So, notwithstanding what happens with Qlusters in the future, the systems management ecosystem seems to be evolving nicely.
Posted: April 17th, 2008 under Systems Management, Configuration and change management, Process automation technologies.
To be clear, at no point did I suggest that GroundWork, Hyperic or Zenoss might turn their back on open source. I merely noted that as Qlusters is no longer supporting the open source openQRM project the supposed “little four” open source systems management vendors is now a “little three”.
If GroundWork did take exception to the post they certainly didn’t let me know about it. Oh, and it’s Aslett, by the way.
Comment by Matthew Aslett — April 18, 2008 @ 3:21 am
Hi Matt,
We definitely didn’t take exception to your post.
What we did say is that we felt the term ‘the Little Four’, which I believe Michael Cote is credited with first coining, wasn’t a great metaphor for what we see in the market, for a number of different reasons.
To begin with, at this time neither GroundWork nor its peers compete against the enormously broad product portfolios of the Big 4, which in addition to availability & event management, cover provisioning, storage management, asset management, help desk, etc.
What we see happening is that products like GroundWork end up filling the ecological niche previously filled by products like OpenView Operations (OVO) and Network Node Manager (NNM). In doing so, GroundWork Monitor is often then integrated with other portions of the datacenter ecosystem (help desk, asset management), playing nicely with some elements of the Big 4, even while displacing others.
It’s really a state of coopetition, a call it ‘Big 4 Plus’ or ‘Big 4.O’, with the ‘O’ being open source.
Comment by David Dennis — April 18, 2008 @ 1:20 pm
To paraphrase Mark Twain,”The rumours of our (open source) demise have been greatly exaggerated.” I think Matt and David have clarified their positions but I think that if we (Zenoss) abandoned open source our company would be less viable.
It’s critical for us to have the input from our open source Zenoss Core project most of our commercial clients have started out with the open source product. Our company and products benefit greatly in every aspect of our business from our open source project.
We also get great input on our product from a user base much larger than our commercial client base. We receive documentation and code donations to extend our products. We have very active forums were users share experience and help each other keeping our support costs low.
While David doesn’t care for the Little 4 metaphor I think what Cote was implying is that large product suites are not addressing the needs of many users. As our IT infrastructure gets more complex users require monitoring platforms that are extensible, easy-to-integrate, and deploy. Features that I think are critical for anyone that is making an investment in this area.
To that point we do see many customers who are already integrating Zenoss solutions with their legacy Big 4 counterparts. I don’t know that we are really in “coopetition” with the Big 4 but we are taking great pains to be easy to integrate with legacy products Big 4 or otherwise.
Comment by Mark Hinkle — April 20, 2008 @ 8:48 am