Hyperic gets big in Europe
Roberto Galoppini has a great write-up on Hyperic, a leading open-source systems management company, and its efforts to crack the European market. After seeing 50 percent of its downloads trend toward Europe, Hyperic has begun hiring technical and sales resources to manage its growth there.
It's no surprise to see Hyperic doing so well. Hyperic has long been one of the most prudent open-source companies, managing (and driving) its growth well. Lately it has been delivering things like CloudStatus to help companies monitor their cloud-based computing resources. (As a testament to how good it is, Hyperic was the first to discover Amazon's recent S3 outage.)
As Hyperic continues to execute against its business model, I expect that it will increasingly reap from the fertile ground of Europe. Sometimes companies get exactly what they deserve.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
The EC2 outage happened before CloudStatus.com had been launched. It was the S3 storage service outage in July which we detected on the site as detailed here:
http://www.hyperic.com/blog/hyperic/2008/07/20/amazon-ec2-s3-sqs-outage-0720/
In addition to detecting outages (which are rare, thankfully) we're really focused on giving users a view into the performance of both Amazon's and Google's environment. We feel its just as important to know availability as it is to understand the underlying performance characteristics of these new environments.