Hyperic: starting from scratch with open-source systems management

Hyperic on Wednesday released the latest version of its open-source systems management software.

The company is one of a handful of smaller open-source management companies, including Zenoss, Groundwork, Qlusters and Hyperic, looking to take on the so-called big four systems management companies--IBM, Hewlett-Packard, BMC Software, and CA.

With Hyperic HQ 3.0, the company has enhanced the auto discovery features so that the software can detect when something is added to a corporate network. Monitoring features allow systems administrators to track specific metrics, such as performance data and log information.

A new operational dashboard presented as a Web application can create a personalized dashboard.

The company's strategy is to design products for modern corporate data centers, said Javier Soltero, CEO of the company.

He said traditional systems management focused on monitoring events. Those products are not sufficient to deal with the complexity systems administrators face with new technologies such as virtualization and distributed Web applications, he said.

"We sell to the guy or gal who has the pain, the person who has to keep something up and running," he said. "These people are overworked and cannot continue to work and reactive way."

Hyperic last year. The open-source project is where adapters to specific systems are generally developed, according to Soltero.

The company's business model is to sell support for that open-source product and a higher-end version with "enterprise extensions."

The cost for the high-end product is $500 per managed server per year. Support services for the open-source product are $120 per managed server per year.

Although there are several open-source challengers to incumbent systems management providers, Soltero takes a dim view of casting challenging products as "like HP OpenView but cheap and open source."

"We quite passionately disavow any comparison between the big 4 vendors and what we are doing," he said. "You have to have pretty lazy ambitions to compare yourself to a 15-year-old, SNMP-based product built by acquiring 100 companies."