groundwork

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

Ubuntu displaces CentOS at Groundwork: Good?

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 … Read more

One Puppet to rule the cloud?

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 … 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 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

Economic downturn = Financial upturn for GroundWork and open source

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.… Read more

Executive moves: Tara Spalding joins Groundwork as VP of Marketing

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 … Read more

Open source leech rails against open source companies

I'm sure these geniuses at PacketTrap posted this manifesto about why commercial open source is no good as part a misguided marketing attempt, but I feel it necessary to comment on just how stupid this is and why this kind of thing leads to a company's failure.

The CEO's argument essentially says commercial open source isn't fair because he can't take all the code (he highlights GPL products) and recast it as his own.

PacketTrap believes that the commercialization of open source by the POSS vendors such as Hyperic and GroundWork Open, however, skillfully undermines … Read more

In the trenches with...Taylor Dondich of Groundwork

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.… Read more