The Open Road

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.

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What's the takeaway when one free operating system displaces another when running your application?

That's the question I'd be asking myself at Groundwork in the wake of news from the Works with U blog that 29 percent of its new users are using Ubuntu to power its IT management application instead of CentOS, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone. When your users are falling all over themselves to avoid paying for an operating system, can the application be far behind?

Within my own company, we weight leads heavier if they are running our application with a paid version of an operating system, application server, or database. As the reasoning goes, if a prospect is willing to pay for one of these, it will be more willing to pay for our software, as well.

I'm guessing that the operating-system data cited by Works with U relates to raw deployments, and not to Groundwork's actual customers, which would have a much higher population of paid OSes running the application. This would comport with the data that we see at Alfresco: strong adoption of Ubuntu in evaluation but production usage sticks with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for the most part, or Windows.

Ironically, an open-source vendor's best determinant of financial success may well be how much its prospects already pay for proprietary software. Such prospects may look to open source to shave costs, but not to evade them completely. I'll feel much better about this Groundwork data when the Ubuntu adoption is paid adoption, not simply free-riding.

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What with all the virtualization hype, one would think that virtual servers had the option of parting the Red Sea or walking on it.

While there's a great deal of promise in virtualization, there's also the peril of managing virtual servers, as Luke Kanies, founder of the Puppet project, points out in a blog post.

You have significant problems when you rely on golden images (i.e., virtual images complete with all necessary services): image sprawl, updating your images, and image state vs. running state...Maintaining these (virtual) images is more like managing a foil ball: it's difficult to pull apart, difficult to press back together, and if you get too many of them, they just get into the way.

It's perhaps not surprising that Kanies sees Puppet as the answer to this image sprawl and confusion:

If, instead, you use a single, base image for all of your work--I call these images stem cell images for what are hopefully obvious reasons--and then use a tool like Puppet to configure them, once they're running, you avoid all of the above problems: you have one image to maintain, and it's necessarily simplistic, you use the same tool and the same configuration base across all images, and Puppet keeps your machines updated within 30 minutes of any central change.

His point is good. In moving from physical machines to virtual machines, we've tended to gloss over the complexity that this introduces, preferring to focus on all the efficiency gains virtualization promises.

In other words, the sexier that virtualization becomes, the more important (and, dare I say sexy?) systems management becomes. Suddenly, Hyperic, Reductive Labs (the company behind Puppet), RiverMuse, Zenoss, GroundWork, and other IT management companies take center stage as virtualization, and the cloud-based computing trend it enables, become de facto IT strategies.

As this new competition emerges, however, the IT management companies that know the cloud best will do best. So far, crowns probably go to Reductive Labs and Hyperic, as both have aggressively targeted cloud-based computing. Over time, however, this may change.

Regardless of the eventual winner, it's good to see IT management gaining some sex appeal.

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.

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?

We are or shortly will be in a recession. While perhaps not cause to celebrate, it's also not cause for alarm as the best companies will emerge all the stronger for the experience.

Good open-source companies will be primary beneficiaries of a downturn, as Stephen Elliot of IDC points out with regard to open-source system management vendors like GroundWork:

With economic uncertainty building on IT organizations, we are seeing enterprise IT organizations tightening their belts when it comes to IT budgets and initiatives. As open source management solutions continue to mature and increase their functionality, they will see more opportunities on the enterprise scale.

I single out GroundWork because I had the opportunity to talk with Dave Lilly, CEO of GroundWork, in advance of next week's Open Source Business Conference 2008 (March 25-26, San Francisco), and got the inside scoop on how the company is doing. GroundWork exemplifies the "unfair advantage" that open-source vendors have when IT buyers actually need the software to work at a reasonable price.

The news is a month old, but if you're like me this little gem slipped by you. Tara Spalding, one of SugarCRM's first employees and former vice president of Corporate Marketing for SugarCRM, has joined Groundwork as vice president of Marketing.

Tara has long been one of my favorite people in open source. She's bright, enthusiastic, and humble in her success. I caught up with her tonight while she was riding the train home and I was screaming for my daughter, Scout, to "SHOOT!" (Some things are even more important than open source. :-)

Tara didn't leave SugarCRM on bad terms. She simply was handed a bigger role at Groundwork and took it. As open source continues to grow we'll see more of this lateral movement between open-source companies. This is healthy. (Indeed, it is one of the largest reason's for Silicon Valley's success: free flowing ideas between companies, including competitors.)

In the meantime, if you don't know Tara, get to know her. She's the sort of person that makes you happy to be in open source.

In this installment of In the Trenches, we get back to the core of any open source company: development. Taylor Dondich is a senior developer at Groundwork. Groundwork is an interesting company because it builds on the popular Nagios monitoring solution. As such, Taylor's work involves a careful balancing act between contributing to the Nagios community while also building out Groundwork's offering around it.

I caught up with Taylor to discover how he balances the two.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Taylor Dondich, Team Leader, Groundwork Open Source, Inc. My role in the company is to develop the front-end technologies that present our product to the user. However, I also develop some back-end technologies and act as a technical resource for network monitoring with Nagios and other tools as well as act as an open source evangelist in the company and outside.

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In this ninth installment of the Open Source CEO Series, I spoke with Ranga Rangachari, CEO of Groundwork, an open source IT management company.

IT Groundwork has been around for several years; in fact, it was one of the first open source startups I discovered when organizing the first Open Source Business Conference back in 2003/04. The company was doing well at the time, but I believe it was Ranga's influence (starting in 2005) that has ratcheted up the company's profile and performance.

Name, position, and company of executive
Ranga Rangachari, CEO, Groundwork.

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