Each year InfoWorld sets out to rate the "best open source products" with its Bossie awards. Too bad it has decided to cloud the voting with open-source politics, as well.
The editors write (note: the emphasis is mine):
Although Zenoss clearly has the more developed feature set, our Bossie goes to OpenNMS. The reason boils down to business models. OpenNMS is a purely open source software project, meaning that customers get the complete set of features available for free as open source. There is no "enterprise" version. OpenNMS makes its money strictly by selling support and training services.
Zenoss uses a common business model in the open source world: it provides an open source version of its software with a limited feature set for free, and it sells a more extensive "enterprise" version of the software with support through an annual subscription. So while Zenoss may be a good value compared to HP or IBM or CA, it's not a good value compared to OpenNMS.
If only enterprise IT could cavalierly discard superfluous things like "features" in favor of licensing ideology. But it can't, which is why Agilent, Telstra, Accenture, MySpace, and other companies that need enterprise-grade network management systems have been opting for Zenoss. They seem to need those pesky "features" that InfoWorld glosses over. They're buying a product, not a political platform.
Regardless, if we allow business model to be a valid factor in InfoWorld's decision criteria, how are we to explain its contradictory decision to judge Intalio the winner in the Business Process Management (BPM) category? The editors reason:
Intalio has been criticized regarding its open source claims, most likely because the company does not provide source code on its Web site (where binaries of the free community edition can be downloaded). However, Intalio's enterprise edition customers do get full access to source code, and the source code of community edition components -- which fall under Apache and Eclipse licenses -- are obtainable from their community-based repositories....
However, new beta features reflect enterprise needs, including a business rules engine, Ajax-driven forms for easier editing, and a more streamlined deployment interface. The full enterprise edition also includes BAM (business activity monitoring), a portal interface, ECM (enterprise content management) based on Alfresco, fail-over clustering, and support for application servers beyond Apache Geronimo.
I think Intalio is great, but I can't understand why Zenoss' business model is considered a demerit but for Intalio, which has the same model, it's a non-factor. Zenoss also provides source code to its enterprise customers, so why is Intalio right because it provides an enterprise-class experience with an Open Core model but Zenoss is wrong for doing the exact same thing?
Personally, I think awards should be given based on the merits that will most appeal to IT buyers, and such will have little to nothing to do with business model nuances and everything to do with solving business problems at a compelling price. If Zenoss is the better enterprise IT bet, shouldn't it get the Bossie, regardless of OpenNMS' licensing model?
InfoWorld set out to name the "top open source products." By deciding, instead, to name the top open-source products and business models, it has failed to serve its audience as well as it has in the past. The Bossies are still a good resource, but it's best to read the reasons behind some votes carefully, as they may have nothing to do with the products at all.
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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.
Zenoss recently announced an expansion to its open-source systems and network management product, creating Zenoss Professional Edition to focus on medium-size enterprises. It's a smart move, but in talking with Zenoss CEO Bill Karpovich this past week, Zenoss is actually doing exceptionally well with large enterprises.
Tyco Enterprises, Johns Hopkins, VMware, and others are public references for Zenoss, but these aren't even the ones I find the most interesting. Unfortunately, the others can't publicly be named....
Still, given Zenoss' traction with large companies and its triple-digit percentage revenue growth quarter-over-quarter, it's perhaps not very surprising, therefore, that Forrester Research recently suggested, "Zenoss looks like a strong competitor for large frameworks."
Which isn't, of course, to say that Zenoss shouldn't sell to medium-size enterprises. Rather, it's just that, like other open-source companies before it, big companies may end up consuming Zenoss' time and attention. That's not a bad thing.
I suppose the big news for me today, as an Alfresco employee, should be that we just closed a $9 million Series C round with SAP Ventures leading the round. But since we didn't need the money (not even remotely) and I didn't want the dilution, it's not my favorite news of the day. Let's just say that companies don't always raise money for the money.
I was actually much more intrigued to see Zenoss add $11 million in Series B funding. Or Intel Capital's Series A investment in REvolution Computing, which provides an open-source statistical tool with commercial support and leverages parallelism.
Perhaps the big story out of the Alfresco and REvolution investments is the activity of Intel and SAP in financing open-source companies.
... Read moreThis is pretty cool (and actually kind of innovative, if you think about it). Zenoss has announced that
it has added a direct integration with Google Maps and struck a business agreement with Google, Inc., that makes real-time, geographical visualization of the health of distributed IT infrastructure available through Zenoss Core, its free, open source software product. The first-of-its-kind offering brings powerful network management capabilities to the masses.
This puts a "consumerish" face on a rather stodgy old application, and I imagine will be heartily welcomed by system administrators. Would you rather stare at a green screen or a Google map?
Me, too.
Open source + the sexy web. Who would have thought? Zenoss, apparently.
Perhaps the most competitive market for commercial open source is the IT management space, where open source vendors must compete with the "Big Four" of enterprise IT management, but also with the "Little Four" of open source enterprise IT management (Hyperic, Zenoss, Groundwork, and OpenNMS).
Today, in our fourteenth installment of the Open Source CEO Series we're talking with Bill Karpovich, CEO and Co-founder of Zenoss. Each of these so-called Little Four compete in very different ways, and hence it's no surprise that their respective CEOs draw different conclusions about how to compete.
Name, position, and company of executive
... Read more
Bill Karpovich, CEO and Co-founder, Zenoss.
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