grounded

Defending against chemical, biological weapons

DUGWAY, Utah--In a world where American soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq might find themselves under attack from chemical or biological weapons, who's looking out for their safety?

The answer lies deep in the western Utah desert, at a U.S. Army facility called the Dugway Proving Ground where, among other things, groups of scientists are researching how to defend against a wide variety of potentially lethal, or at least dangerous, "agents."

"Dugway's primary mission is testing United States and Allied chemical and biological (CB) defense systems and also performing nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) contamination … Read more

Catching up with GroundWork's new CEO, Peter Jackson

Open source has seen a flurry of executive appointments in the past few weeks, but no open-source company can top GroundWork for the level of CEO turnover in the past two years. In 2007, Ranga Rangachari helmed GroundWork. By 2008, company co-founder Dave Lilly had replaced Rangachari.

In early 2009, GroundWork slotted Lilly into the COO role, replacing him as CEO with Peter Jackson. Jackson was recently CEO of Intraware, a company he grew to $100 million in sales and eventually sold in January 2009, and seems a competent chief to lead the company.

Even so...three years, three CEOs. Worried a bit by all this change, I reached out to Jackson to get his perspective on GroundWork's business and its open-source opportunity.

You come from a Web 2.0 background. What brought you to GroundWork?

What's nice about Web 2.0 technologies is that they're really focused on creating controlled communities. The original Web development efforts didn't do a good job regulating users on what they can and can't do. Applying that thinking to open source allows producers and users to share in safe and open areas. This includes blogs, entitlement-based distribution, shared testing and QA, questions to groups, uploading training videos, etc.

In GroundWork's case, we need to appeal to both the open-source community and to IT-reliant enterprises. This combination of Web 2.0 community building, while understanding and meeting the demands of enterprise customers, is a great chance for me to bring my experience in both areas to the company.

You took Intraware public. Do you think GroundWork and other open-source companies will have the same opportunity?

I see open source radically changing the software market in the next 24 months. Customers of traditional enterprise products and services have way overpaid for years. As companies analyze their capital expenditures more deeply, they suddenly find huge value gaps between their historical IT management purchases and open-source alternatives.

With this in mind, if the stock market recovers in a couple of years, there should be many IPOs in this sector.… Read more

Executive moves: Acquia, Alfresco, Groundwork, and Black Duck get new leadership

While the technology industry has been laying off large numbers of employees, the open-source software industry has been hiring, at least at the executive level.

In the past week, Acquia, Alfresco, Groundwork, and Black Duck have all added executive leadership:

Acquia - Company founder Dries Buytaert announced Tom Erickson as Acquia's new CEO, replacing Jay Batson in that role. Batson will remain with the company in an as-yet undefined role. Erickson brings to Acquia a wealth of experience, including as CEO of Systinet, which he successfully sold to Mercury Interactive in 2006. Erickson is a great addition to the … Read more

Sirius' on-again, off-again signal problems

Sirius Satellite Radio has a lot on its plate. Shock jock Howard Stern is already making noises about leaving after his contract expires in a couple of years, the stock price is in the tank, and the company has huge debt.

All of that shouldn't matter to subscribers, of which I am one. But the frequent signal dropouts are really getting out of hand.

I had similar problems in the early days, but after a while, the dropouts became rare. Months would go by without signal interruptions, but about six months ago, the off-and-on signal problems returned.

Sometimes, the dropout lasts just a few seconds but occurs many times an hour. My Sirius home radio hasn't budged since I first got it many years ago, and my antenna is pretty much in the same place it has always been, but lately, the signal regularly disappears for minutes at a time before sputtering back to life. … Read more

Military challenge: Make spy data more accessible

Action spy dramas increasingly feature a computer geek character who accesses everything from satellite imagery to floor plans to convenience store security cameras, then feeds the data to his team, saving the day. This type of work, it turns out, is easier said than done.

Two agencies are trying to make it easier to access and blend Web-based snoop-scoop. The U.S. Joint Forces Command and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are sponsoring an annual demonstration called Empire Challenge, which "seeks to improve interoperability of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities" among end users.

One of last year's Challenge … Read more

HP tries to hide its pricing from customers and open-source competitors

On October 13, 2008, Hewlett-Packard (HP) sent a complaint to an open-source competitor, GroundWork, asking GroundWork to stop revealing HP's "confidential" pricing. I have posted the letter below. What HP isn't correcting is GroundWork's contention that HP's IT monitoring software is considerably more expensive than that of its open-source competition.

Does HP think its pricing is really a secret? It's publicly available at GSA Advantage (albeit most GSA pricing actually reflects discounting of roughly 10 percent). Guess what? HP software costs a lot of money. Is anyone surprised?

GroundWork has been highlighting its cost advantages over HP's Operations Manager and Network Node Manager offerings for some time, declaring an 82-percent cost advantage over HP's products. This isn't news.

So why is HP sending letters to GroundWork (and InformationWeek, which hosted a webinar on the subject), demanding that its pricing be buried? According to a source familiar with the matter, it was apparently GroundWork's live webcast (registration here) on September 30, 2008, which roughly a dozen HP employees attended, that seriously rankled HP.

Why? Perhaps because the data presented starkly reveals just how pricey software like HP's can be.… Read more

The ignored nonrecovery of New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS--Don't let anyone ever tell you that New Orleans is doing just fine three years after Hurricane Katrina.

Sure, it's true that some areas of the city, like the French Quarter or the Garden District, seem back to normal, with swarms of tourists, drinks flowing, and the leisurely pace and laid-back attitude the city is famous for on full display. And it's also true that there are parts of town where you'd never know anything bad happened.

But in the Lower Ninth Ward, the poverty-stricken part of New Orleans that took the biggest hit from … Read more

The open-source CEO: An interview with Dave Lilly of GroundWork

I caught up with Dave Lilly, founder and CEO of GroundWork, earlier this week to see how things are going. Lilly recently replaced GroundWorks' former CEO, Ranga Rangachari, and I was interested to hear about the changes at GroundWork.

GroundWork is an open-source network management company that ostensibly competes with Hyperic, Zenoss, and other open-source IT management companies, but it seems that GroundWork (as well as these others) tends to be a replacement or complement to the big proprietary offerings from HP, BMC, and others.

What has Dave been working on in his first few months as CEO?

In April, we launched our latest version of GroundWork Monitor Open Source 5.2 for Community, Professional, and now GroundWork Monitor Enterprise to meet the needs of our customer base. In 2007, GroundWork saw customers with distributed, enterprise-class deployments increase to nearly 60 percent of our customer base. Nearly a third of GroundWork's subscriber base upgraded to enterprise-class subscriptions. Additionally, in Q1 of 2008, we signed on some new key customers, such as Cap Gemini, Pioneer Hi-Bred, University of Akron and National Bank of Belgium.

Interesting. How has this move into the enterprise affected your work with other open-source projects, specifically Nagio? I've seen some announcements from you and Nagios over the past few months; can you clarify your relationship with Nagios and some of the other open-source projects out there? … Read more

Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues

CLARKSDALE, Miss.--When in Rome, as they say.

As part of Road Trip 2008, my journey through the South in search of several weeks' worth of stories, I had accepted an invitation to come to this tiny town in northwest Mississippi for the opportunity to visit one of the most important Blues clubs in the country.

It turns out that the club, the Ground Zero Blues Club, is co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman and the father of a friend of mine. Lured by the opportunity to talk with the two of them about airplanes--since I'd heard that Freeman and … Read more