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.
GroundWork CEO Peter Jackson
(Credit: Groundwork)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?
... Read moreI 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.
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 Acquia team.
- GroundWork - Peter Jackson (no, not that Peter Jackson) has taken the helm at open-source IT management company GroundWork. Jackson joins GroundWork from Intraware, where he had served as CEO, and prior to that was CEO of Dataflex and Granite Systems. Jackson took Intraware public and, all going well, will hope to repeat that feat at GroundWork.
- Alfresco - Bill Robinson, former senior vice president of sales at Witness Systems and vice president of North American sales at Business Objects before that, has joined Alfresco as vice president of the Americas. This one strikes close to home (I was running the Americas for Alfresco up until Friday), and makes me very, very happy, as I will get to focus on our top strategic partners and other key initiatives, and makes my quarter-ends much more pleasant. Just last quarter US sales recorded serious double-digit growth in the midst of a brutal economy, but the numbers are getting large enough that having Robinson helm Alfresco's primary sales geography makes a great deal of sense.
- Black Duck - While not an open-source company, Black Duck's fate is inextricably tied up in open source, and putting Red Hat's former senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Tim Yeaton, in as its new CEO is a major coup. I talked with Yeaton about the role and think he's perfect to help Black Duck recast its message so that it's not mistaken for an open-source FUD vendor.
There are some other executive appointments, but they're not yet public so I'll defer from pre-announcing them here. There are also others - like Greg Schott's appointment as CEO of MuleSource - that have already been covered on this blog.
It's good to see how dynamic open-source business remains, and that the open-source world is attracting the best and brightest of the proprietary software world.
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
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.
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Dave Lilly, CEO of GroundWork
(Credit: 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?
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