Brief news on the state of the ZipTie community and product.
While I'm on the subject of new open source startups/projects, I just heard about ZipTie. The ZipTie open source community launched in November 2006, and recently got an upgrade from its corporate backer, AlterPoint.
I talked with AlterPoint about the new ZipTie release and was told the following:
The new 2007.06 ZipTie release lets network administrators and hardware vendors use graphical tools to extend ZipTie to any network hardware device - routers, switches, hubs, firewalls, load balancers, wireless access points, etc. - from any vendor with minimum development effort. In contrast, most network configuration management tools use proprietary software that only supports specific hardware vendors. In a matter of hours, a network administrator can download this latest release of ZipTie, discover an entire inventory with hundreds of devices and be ready for automated changes.
In addition, developers can utilize ZipTie?s network automation capabilities and existing plug-ins to import existing scripts into a common framework or to build their own network tools. For example, a network administrator can easily integrate a community string modification script with the ZipTie tools plug-in framework, quickly run the script against hundreds of devices and get detailed status of each change. This will eventually eliminate the competitive proof point of "library size" from proprietary vendors.
Just one more proofpoint that open source is going everywhere. It's in Mobile, Telecom, and Enterprise IT (among other markets), powers the Web (and its most demanding applications), and infiltrates most other markets. Scary to think that we're just at the beginning of open source's power to change how we work with softwre.