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Zenoss aims at small and medium businesses, hits big enterprises

Zenoss is releasing a new product focused on small and medium-size businesses, but it may not be able to keep the big enterprises away from its ease of use and cost savings.

Matt Asay Contributing Writer
Matt Asay is a veteran technology columnist who has written for CNET, ReadWrite, and other tech media. Asay has also held a variety of executive roles with leading mobile and big data software companies.
Matt Asay

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.