RE: Why Only Two?
John Willis over at IT Management and Cloud Blog posted an interesting post I’d like to reply to.
The key question is will “Enterprise” customers make an investment in companies like OpenNMS and Nagios with out the warm and fuzzy that “Software Companies” provide.
That’s certainly an interesting perspective John…
It isn’t that Nagios/OpenNMS aren’t hitting enterprise customers. It is the nature of the sale that is different.
Nagios/OpenNMS is more of a bottom up kinda sell. Network technicians use the projects without telling the higher ups and hopefully they can spring for consultancy and training later on after they’ve derived value from it.
The “mighty two” (Zenoss/Hyperic) sell in a more traditional “enterprise” way by going through the CIO and getting a “Big 4 lite” sale.
As impressive as OpenNMS, and Nagios have been bootstrapping themselves it is extremely difficult for them to compete at the enterprise level without the same kind of funding that Hyperic and Zenoss have.
Ultimately, If you are right, then the “mighty two” products should be substantially better, more feature rich than Nagios/OpenNMS.
What features in the “mighty two” aren’t available in Nagios/OpenNMS?
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I responded to this many hours ago, but it doesn’t look like John is moderating today.
I got my panties in a wad over a couple of his comments. First, while the OpenNMS Project (http://www.opennms.org) is independent, purely open source and community driven, that doesn’t mean that the commercial services company, The OpenNMS Group (http://www.opennms.com) isn’t a *real* company. We have a board, dedicated developers, etc. We even have people who do sales and marketing. (grin)
The difference is that as a services company we do things differently than a software company. Both Zenoss and Hyperic are software companies: i.e. they sell software licenses. Sure, a company US$10 million will be able to produce more than a company with US$1 million, but if the bulk of that development is proprietary and requires “per node” pricing, how is that different from Tivoli and OpenView?
John dismissed Groundwork out of hand, but one should realize that they’ve been at this for many more years than Zenoss and Hyperic, and in fact have raised as much money (about US$24 million) as both of those combined. How will the two companies he favors avoid the same fate as Groundwork?
It’s not about the money, it’s about trying to hold the disparate ideas of commercial software and open source together under the same name. I don’t buy it and my guess is that market as a whole won’t. It will be interesting to revisit this in a couple of years.
Quote | Posted April 25, 2008, 8:32 pm@Tarus - I believe that John is flying to Australia so is likely incommunicado. I think you’re right…it will be interesting to see where the whole VC thing goes. Both Hyperic & Zenoss will be nearing the 3 yr mark soon so I would imagine that a cash out event must be pretty close. Wonder who’s gonna buy ‘em?
Quote | Posted April 25, 2008, 9:31 pmOr we could talk about more important things, like pints in London on May 12th. We’ll be here:
Brainstorm Mobile Solutions
Highgate Studios, Studio 312
53/79 Highgate Road
London NW5 1TL
if you can join us that evening.
Quote | Posted April 26, 2008, 11:36 amDid some one say pints? Perhaps over pints you’ll be quite surprised to hear off the record our client list. Cheers! P.S. Tarus saying he got his panties in a wad is not a good visual
Quote | Posted April 27, 2008, 6:33 pm[...] RE: Why Only Two? More discussion of OpenNMS vs. (Hyperic|Zenoss|GroundWork). Really, I guess the question is which one do enterprise people want, not which one is /real/ company. Things get too nuanced in the weeds otherwise. (tags: opennms tarus johnwillis itmanagement itmanagementguys hyperic zenoss) [...]
Quote | Posted April 29, 2008, 7:25 amPints in London? Arg, I hate you guys!
-John Mark
Quote | Posted April 29, 2008, 9:12 pmHyperic Community Manager
zenoss doesnt have windows server on a distributed environment as groundwork has. Every product have their pros and cons. How could anyone dismiss groundwork straight away?
Quote | Posted May 12, 2008, 5:02 am