Zenoss: Bringing open source to enterprise management
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(InfoWorld) - If you curse your "tier-one" IT management solution as too cumbersome, too complex, and too expensive, you're not alone. In arecent Gartner study that declares the "Big Four" -- BMC, CA, HP, and IBM -- increasingly vulnerable to SaaS (software as a service) and open source alternatives, surveyed users gave their vendors mostly C's and D's, and a good number of incompletes. For Bill Karpovich, co-founder and CEO of Zenoss, dissatisfaction with the leading management frameworks is a business model. In fact, Karpovich notes, Zenoss' open source network and system monitoring solution was born from the failure of IBM Tivoli at USi, an application service provider (and now a subsidiary of AT&T) where he and Zenoss inventor and CTO Erik Dahl used to work. "At USi we had spent millions on IBM Tivoli, and like many people we were very unhappy that it didn't work," Karpovich recalls. "Erik was the architect that was brought in to help us figure out our management platform. Erik's recommendation was to throw out Tivoli and build our own." And so USi built its own management infrastructure, which included both commercial off-the-shelf products and open source software, bringing all of the pieces together into a framework called USi Oasis. The experience led Dahl to realize there was a big opportunity to build a next-generation network and systems management product on the open source stack. He left USi to do just that. The difference between Dahl's "next-generation" approach and the traditional tools, Karpovich says, is the focus on relationships among network devices, servers, and applications rather than on individual systems. "Model-based management has been Erik's philosophy from day one, and today that is called a CMDB basically," Karpovich says. "So that was at the core of the product from the start, building that model in an object way that is extensible and supports complex relationships." According to Karpovich, the Big Four, built back in the client/server era, simply didn't have the right data model to account for these relationships, or to provide the different views into the IT environment that enterprises need today. And their way of doing business is outdated too, he adds. "They're living off an old version of the enterprise software model that doesn't exist today, which is selling software for a million dollars and having it take a year to deploy," Karpovich says. "We're just beyond that." As Zenoss Core approaches its 2.0 release in June, the open source project boasts more than 13,000 registered downloads from SourceForge.Net. Among the additions in the new release are discovery of configuration policy violations and a plug-in framework for application monitoring packs called ZenPacks. ZenPacks for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server will be immediately available to enterprise subscribers from Zenoss, with more ZenPacks to follow from the company and the community in coming months. The enterprise edition also features a WYSIWYG environment for running synthetic transactions against Web applications, providing a way to monitor a Web site from the user's point of view. "You can correlate the end-user experience with all of the element level views," Karpovich explains. "So I can say, Wow, I broke my 8-second rule on adding an item to the shopping cart, and I wonder what was happening on my network at the time, I wonder what was happening with memory and disk? Were there any processes that were taking up too much CPU?" Zenoss' business model is based on selling professional services, support, and value-added functionality to enterprise subscribers. But Karpovich believes the company's success depends on leveraging the community to improve the product, build out the library of ZenPacks, and most of all, help Zenoss keep up with rapidly changing needs. "That's where the Big Four struggled in the past, right?" asks Karpovich, suggesting one last lesson from history. "A technology trend occurs, and a year later you get a management tool for it. It's just too slow. The world moves too quickly. "IT management is the infinite problem, so it's perfect for open source," Karpovich concludes. "One company simply can't generate enough ideas or enough R&D to stay on top of managing all of IT."
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Even as such open source software developers as Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) and OpenOffice.org wax enthusiastic concerning enterprise deployments of their respective Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Office alternatives, industry analysts are urging caution.
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The Eclipse Foundation is developing an open source SOA framework intended for applications ranging from enterprise environments to embedded systems.
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InfoWorld - At the annual LinuxWorld Conference &amp; Expo this week, top-tier vendors in the Linux space will roll out a raft of enterprise products, with a few vendors laying out road maps for pushing their open source strategies higher in the enterprise.
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Research: Businesses are going open source, but OS may still be too technical for most users. The open-source operating system Linux may be gaining a lot of ground in the enterprise space, but Windows will
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Is open source becoming the dumping ground for no-longer-wanted software, sort of like a Salvation Army dropoff point for programs instead of old clothes?
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Open-source enterprise software developer OpenLogic wants open-source users to stand up and be counted in a worldwide census-- and is offering a new software tool to help the process.
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Linux advocates have long insisted that open-source development results in better and more secure software. Now they have statistics to back up their claims.
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Open source is not always the best software.  When it's not, use something else.  Is this complicated?
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Open source vendor OpenLogic is today kicking off a new industry initiative meant to help both users and software companies find out precisely what kinds of open source software is being used -- and who is using it.
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This is what the future looks like.  Heavy adoption of open source at the core of commercial software so that developers can focus on pushing the envelope on innovation, not reinventing wheels that provide no discernible differentiation.
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The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Open source doesn't necessarily automatically translate into better paid support for customers.  But it does offer a lot more options and aligns customers with vendors more tightly.
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David Wheeler presents an introduction to the Bricolage content management system (CMS).
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Semantic interoperability remains a utopian vision without many practical implementations.
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Ross Mayfield has an interesting take on the Lenovo/IBM deal and bringing open source to the desktop in his blog... I believe their commoditization strategy is more than hardware.
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New .mobi and .jobs, a shift in the ownership of .net