Next, just a few weeks ago in August and barely 90 days into our SpringSource acquisition, we announced that SpringSource was itself being acquired by VMware (already arguably the next great enterprise software company).  In the process, Hyperic, SpringSource and VMware are defining a platform for computing that we all believe will revolutionize the way companies deploy and manage business applications and drive significant efficiencies for IT operators and developers.

Hyperic’s management software products are a key part of that vision.  We have heard from many journalists and analysts who greeted the announcement and vision with great interest not only because of the tremendous value of the Spring technologies, but also because of the potential this might have to the Hyperic management software products.

I wanted to use this rare blog post opportunity to outline key Hyperic principles that haven’t changed and we remain committed to.  If anything, recent news re-affirms them as we move towards both closing this acquisition and further integrating the teams.

Openness is the key to our continued success

Both Hyperic and SpringSource are companies built on open source technologies and strong communities. Our users’ ability to freely use, modify, and participate in the development of our products has been key to our success. In Hyperic’s case, the development of community supported plug-ins on our HyperForge, and most importantly the feedback that is provided by the passionate operations people who depend on our product is a key to our success. In addition to supporting our open source efforts, Hyperic is an open product that supports various different runtimes, platforms, and environments beyond those provided directly by us. By being inclusive in our support of manageable technologies, we appeal to more users and offer a broad product offering in Hyperic. VMware does not intend to change this. As various VMware and SpringSource executives including myself have noted over the last few weeks, openness will continue and thrive in our new environment.

New solutions to new (and growing) problems

I’ve long argued that Hyperic’s vision of management software is aimed at helping people manage a newer, more complex, and more dynamic data center environment. For the last five years we have delivered that vision, including being one of the few management software products providing end‑to‑end support for virtualized application environments from the hardware to the virtualized service component. By joining forces with VMware, Hyperic will continue to fulfill this vision in lockstep with VMware’s ambitions to simplify IT and reduce operational expenses. Earlier this month I was very proud to hear VMware CEO Paul Maritz highlight Hyperic’s technology and vision in his keynote address at VMworld and emphasize how important building the next generation of management solutions is to the future of Vmware. We are proud to be a part of helping fulfill that vision along with the very talented management software experts at Vmware.

Simplicity and Reduced Operating Costs

Flexibility and ease of deployment are key values that have made Hyperic a success in some of the largest and most demanding datacenter environments in the world. These values are shared by our new co-workers from VMware and SpringSource. Companies merge and get acquired for all kinds of different reasons; however in this case it’s fair to say that the common thread that brings us all together is the opportunity to help people build new applications and infrastructure without exponential complexity. This is the value of the cloud, and is the goal that we will continue to reach for as we both expand our existing HQ and IQ products, power new offerings like SpringSource tc Server and CloudFoundry.com, and build the next generation of management products.

While other vendors consolidate, rationalize, and rebrand, we’ll be busy building out new and exciting technologies to help define what management will look like as we enter a truly new era in technology. It’s been an incredible ride thus far (especially the last 100 days) and we hope you will join us for the next chapter. I assure you it will be very interesting.

Today we are proud to announce that Hyperic has been acquired by SpringSource. It’s been a pretty exciting couple of months here at our San Francisco headquarters. Luckily our team hasn’t missed a beat in our continued quest to build a great software company.

Why is this a Good Thing?

This combined company will provide the widest choice of market-leading products — from a single vendor — that address the needs of developers AND operations.

Over the last 5 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the divide between developers and operations is a huge obstacle in building more scalable, manageable applications. Hyperic’s most successful customers seem to be the ones who’ve built manageability into their apps, as opposed to those that simply monitor and manage the products the app is built on. These customers use Hyperic technology to gain a better understanding of the behavior and limits of their apps and are more successful at the fine art of keeping them running at optimal performance.

Hyperic has been working hard to help tear down the brick wall that often exists between operations and development. In fact, we started this company because the founders (all developers) knew all too well how tough and distracting it was to be a developer called into firefighting situations (Backflip.com comes to mind…). We started by accepting the incredible responsibility of providing software that wakes ops people up when things inevitably go wrong. We soon realized that there was a bigger opportunity to provide products that help both developers and operations be successful. SpringSource’s acquisition of Hyperic enables us to seize this opportunity as one company. Rod & the SpringSource team agree.

Joining forces with SpringSource gives us the opportunity to reach legions of developers and bring to life the vision of a full lifecycle company. One company which provides modern, open tools, runtimes, and management solutions that are (as described in the Spring Framework mission statement) “a pleasure to use” : developer tools like SpringSource Tool Suite, runtimes like  dm_server and the new tc_server, and of course management from Hyperic HQ & IQ.

As part of this acquisition, it’s important to make clear that SpringSource remains committed to Hyperic’s breadth of managed technologies. Our customers use us to manage Enterprise Java, LAMP, Windows, and Unix environments built on a mixture of open source and commercial middleware. We will continue to innovate around management of virtualized applications as well as those built in the cloud. We will do this because it is part of what makes Hyperic’s technology the top choice for managing the most demanding applications.

What about the team?

Successful acquisitions are all about people. As part of this acquisition, Hyperic’s stellar team will combine with SpringSource’s to create a world-class staff of the most creative product, support, marketing and sales people in the industry. This means that our customers and partners will continue to receive the same high level of product support and innovation from the same folks they have enjoyed working with. I will continue to own and focus on the vision for management & cloud products and will join SpringSource as CTO of Management Products.

Our employees, executives, and directors are extremely excited about the huge opportunity this combined company represents. In an time where mergers among goliaths are the norm, the teams behind two fast growing, young companies are combining to provide the world an alternative to the locked-in, old-school, painful, and expensive software of the 20th century.

How did we get here?

In 2004, our founders Doug, Charles, Ryan, John and I set out to redefine how large-scale web applications and infrastructure are managed.  We wanted to create a company built around software that was focused on the new era of operations management and capable of handling the latest Web technologies, constant change and the demanding environments of mission-critical applications. More than anything, we wanted to build a company that changed the way people evaluate, purchase, and deploy enterprise-grade management technology. I think we succeeded!  Proof of that success can be found in many hundreds of happy customers and over 5,000 open source deployments.

SpringSource has a similar vision.  Just as we revolutionized the way companies monitor and manage applications, SpringSource has defined a new era for application development with the Spring Framework. They’ve extended that now to a broader vision around run-times and management (us) to give customers and the community an entire application lifecycle platform.  Like us, SpringSource depends on the innovation and collaboration that is only possible through Open Source. Our commitment to our community will strengthen through our combination with SpringSource’s extensive experience in building great open source projects.

What’s next?

Obviously, this acquisition brings up a lot of questions.  We are 100 percent committed to providing answers and helping make this transition as seamless and transparent as possible for our customers, partners, employees and community.  As such, we have set up several forums where people can go to get more information:

• Visit the announcement landing page
• Read the press release
• Join us for a Webinar on May 20th when we will share our vision

Rod Johnson (CEO of SpringSource) also shared his thoughts on what this means for SpringSource on his blog.

I couldn’t be prouder of what we have accomplished at Hyperic over the last five years.  Today’s announcement is a testament to the top-notch product, services and sales support that we have built in our organization.

We’re excited to starting working together as the SpringSource team.

Assuming an entrepreneur wants to be successful, my conclusion is that the only real choices for the basis of a new technology company are open source, the cloud (including SaaS) or innovation that can be considered “indistinguishable from magic” (with due respect to the late Arthur C. Clarke).

Why?

The name of the game these days is to do more with less.  As such, for a business to stand a chance of surviving let alone thriving, it has to be delivered as a service through the cloud (read: easier to adopt, cheaper, more scalable) or be based around a low-cost, open, customer-driven delivery model.

…Or, you’ve got to invent something that is so groundbreaking and world-changing that the market would tolerate the old guard of closed-source innovation.  Something about which tech-savvy, forward-thinking individuals are gap-mouthed and incredulous when they first see it.  Think Linux circa 1992 (wow, UNIX on a PC), virtualization circa 1999 (what?  Windows running on Linux… with sound?!?!?!) and the iPhone circa now (the touch screen is like magic).

I’m not a futurist, of course, but short of a flying car, I’m not clear on what magic could be coming our way.  Any guesses?

Now past its 5th year of production usage, it’s incredibly cool for me to see how this product has evolved from what we conceived back in 2002. With the help of hundreds of customers and thousands of users, we’ve been able to stay focused on two key themes that drive everything we build into our product:

1- the desire to build products that help people manage large scale web environments
2- the desire to build products that do not create new problems while attempting to solve old ones

HQ 4.0 represents a big step forward for both of those themes. HQ 4.0 provides unique levels of visibility into every aspect of web applications and then uses that visibility to offer insight into diagnosing complex issues from virtualization layers all the way up the stack, forecast capacity requirements, and helping operations teams get reliable, detailed notification of problems before they create a crisis. HQ 4.0 also delivers these benefits alongside a whole new set of automation capabilities including extended, open API’s, UI automation workflows, and automatic agent upgrading. In a time when the demands of data center operations teams increase while resources are scarce, we want to make sure our technology helps people manage more with less.

4.0 also represents Hyperic’s continued commitment to innovation in the management space. 4.0 introduces the worlds first web application management solution designed and packaged natively for the Amazon AWS cloud. HQ for AWS is packaged as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) which leverages technology like Elastic Block Storage to provide a fully cloud-enabled solution that can be deployed as easily as any other EC2 AMI out there. It also provides the first cloud-friendly management agent which allows users to manage cloud based virtual machines securely and reliably from either inside the cloud, or from HQ 4.0 installations inside your datacenter. Our good friend John Willis wrote up his impressions on the importance of this new development in HQ’s architecture on his blog.

CloudStatus.com, our free cloud monitoring service is actually built on HQ 4.0 and has been running inside EC2 since inception. We use this experience to build the coolest, richest monitoring and management product for companies looking to deploy production web applications inside AWS. Over the next few weeks we’ll be announcing innovative pricing plans for users of this HQ 4.0 for AWS and additional management features aimed at letting HQ 4.0 users leverage the benefits of all Amazon Web Services as part of their applications.

Thanks again to all our developers, customers, and community members for helping us create this very exciting release.

It looks like Google Apps suffered a brief outage this morning. How did we find out? Well, from Valleywag of course. After all, the best place to get the status of key cloud based applications and infrastructure is also the same place where you can find out the latest gossip about the valley. Seems natural, right? No thanks.

More proof that for all the benefits the cloud offers, it’s still just one lousy powerstrip/drunk ops guy/evil hax0r away from being just a 500 error page with an old logo on it. Good thing we’re working on adding Google’s cloud services to CloudStatus.com! Stay tuned…

This afternoon we get another data point showing that despite the exciting promise of cloud computing, the realities of managing large scale infrastructure insist on rearing their ugly heads. TechCrunch is reporting that Google Apps had an outage today which caused the service to be completely down.

There’s two serious problems with this outage:

1- The reports of service outages arrive long after anyone who depends on the services can possibly do anything to mitigate their effect.

2- The services themselves seem incapable of providing any visibility into the circumstances that might lead to future outages.

On the first point, despite my affinity for TechCrunch, I think it’s rather sad that that is the place where the outage is most prominently chronicled. After all, TechCrunch is a news site. Counting on news sites to explain why your cloud dependent app is broken is like finding out from CNN that your house is on fire.

The second point just shows how these cloud services seem dependent on blogs (again, news technology) as a means to report the status of their services. Even TechCrunch points out that the Google Apps blog doesn’t even mention the outage. Other clouds rely on blogs such as this one, this one, or maybe even this one (from our good friends at Mosso). These are all places where outages can be discussed, but not the right means for people to find out whether it was their application that crashed, or the cloud that it depends on.

Without this type of visibility and transparency (as TC’s article points out) it will be difficult for serious , mission critical applications to be built using clouds. Even if the company providing the cloud is as famous and respected as Google and Amazon both are.

The short answer, as revealed to ZDNet: “These are complicated systems”

Perhaps they’re taking their cues on explaining outages the way Facebook let’s its users explain odd relationships: “It’s Complicated” (though I think Facebook took out that feature a while back)

It doesn’t take a first hand tour of Amazon’s data centers in order to gauge how truly expansive their infrastructure is. Global facilities, hundreds of thousands of servers, and tons of complex apps all serving the most expansive e-commerce platform in the world. It’s precisely this expertise, scale, and complexity that is often quoted as the rationale for why they are leading the charge around cloud computing.

The various articles describing the outage all wondered whether any of the Amazon Web Services were affected by the outage. I say “wondered” mostly because there was really no way of telling! The AWS site itself was also unavailable!

It appeared that Amazon Web Services such as the S3 storage and EC2 computing services continued to function at least for some customers, though the Amazon Web Services page at Amazon.com wasn’t working.

This left all of the users and businesses (including some Hyperic customers) who are relying on Amazon’s expertise and track record to essentially hope that the services they’re consuming are healthy and available. The press covering the outage had to rely on calling on actual end users and asking them (awkwardly, I’m sure) “Hey, is your app working right?” Luckily, it appears that the AWS services were not affected by the outage based on the accounts from SmugMug and Mashery.

There’s no denying that Amazon is great at operations and that they truly do have incredible infrastructure. That said, it’s yet another wake-up call to those who think that simply offloading their computing to the cloud (whether Amazon’s or anyone elses) implicitly insulates them from outages. Consumers of the cloud need to be smarter about this, and the providers of the cloud need to be much more transparent about their service levels.

I imagine an AWS customer calling into the support tech’s at Amazon would likely get a response with the same level of detail: “It’s complicated”

Perhaps the greatest irony of working in the management software business is the fact that the problems our products solve are the same ones that keep people from finding us. After all, who has time to look for new software when you’re busy fighting fires, right?

This is the reason why we’ve historically made such a big deal about the role search plays in helping people find Hyperic. Interestingly, people dont tend to search explicitly for Hyperic… instead they search for things like:

- “total nursery size weblogic”

- “how to find replication transactions in mssql 2005″

- “exchange 2003 monitor total ops per user”

- “freebsd open files per process”

Each one of these items (found in our huge search logs) came from someone out there, looking to troubleshoot a problem with part of their infrastructure. Even more interesting, each of these search results points to either documentation about the problem, a reference to someone else looking for the answer, or a product that can help you find the answer (namely ours!). This pattern repeats itself thousands of times a day and is a key part of how more and more people will find out about HQ and how it might help them.

Google’s search engine has proved to be the best tool for people to use to solve these problems not just by finding software, but by pointing them at the potential answers to some potentially obscure questions. The skill of going from an obscure error message in your Apache logs to a solution to a production issue is essential in any web ops or admin role these days and your success rate is highly dependent on how well you construct the query in the first place.

It’s also an incredibly important skill for developers. I’ve long maintained that the skill that Doug (our CTO/co-founder) has for finding references to poorly documented management APIs or references to strange errors (here’s looking at you, Webs-Fear) is one of our many secret weapons.

That skill itself is a key ingredient for success of sysadmins, and even developers and something I would argue should be measured as part of the interviewing process for either position. Seems reasonable, right? Talk to any of our developers (or folks who have interviewed here) and they’ll tell you we have a pretty grueling interview process with a lot of code-related questions. It’d be great if companies could develop an equally useful method to measure how effective a candidate may be at finding the answer to some challenging troubleshooting questions.

I’m curious if anyone has figured out a way to measure and evaluate this skill as part of their interviewing process… perhaps one day we’d have a whole methodology for testing this like we test for coding skills.

Removing this “undifferentiated heavy lifting” (hereto referred as UHL) from your cycles is supposed to free operations to spend more time actually operating. As I was listening to the talk, I wondered how many folks believe there is some competitive advantage in UHL? Certainly choice of hardware, network architecture, data center setup all fall under UHL and can mean the difference between success at scale versus utter failure. Nonetheless, the argument is that you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel and should take advantage from those providers (Amazon in this case) who do the UHL for you, right? Well, a lot of people certainly think so based on how much press and use is being directed towards the cloud.

This begs raises the question: “If racking boxes, configuring OS’s and so forth is UHL today, what will be UHL tomorrow?” That question is material to companies in the systems management market because getting caught on the wrong side of UHL means your future is (as our favorite magic 8 ball would say) “Outlook Not So Good”.

Luckily, UHL today is mostly about the pain associated with hardware and network provisioning and configuration. These problems are bounded just enough to make it feasible for someone to simply delegate them to a cloud provider (as many already have). Of course, the implications to management vendors focused on managing UHL tasks are not pleasant if you buy the idea that most applications will move into this sort of an environment. If you buy this vision, then conceivably the future will require one GIANT Tivoli license for the One-Cloud-Provider-To-Rule-Them-All, right? Heh, not quite, but it’s fun to think about it that way!

The reality is that this trend is forcing both service providers as well as application developers to rethink their operation strategy. Providers want to be more like clouds, developers want to run inside them.

Why rethink their ops strategy? Because the stuff that sits above the UHL layer… the middleware, the databases, and most importantly, the code that makes up a given application present the most daunting challenges due to their complexity. This leaves a meaty management problem yet to be solved. One that has more to do with managing complex software stacks with components which might reside inside or outside of the cloud and with an ‘elasticity’ (to borrow another one of Werner’s terms) which demands equal agility in the management layer than what is found in the software stack.

This is where the next big wave of innovation will happen in the management space, and we’re excited to be a part of it. Come visit our booth at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I’ve been lucky to hear Marten speak at a number of events, and have found that one of the most consistent themes can be distilled down to this (which we at Hyperic fully subscribe to):

Build a great product, Empower your Users, Build a great business

He also reiterated the importance of the GPL as an essential element to drive empowerment of users. This lets them adopt products and participate while creating an opportunity for businesses to deliver value people are willing to pay for. A virtuous cycle, right? Sun seems to think so also (a billion dollars is not the type of money any company throws around lightly)

Ironically, as I was in the middle of writing this post, Slashdot’s editors let out this gem in a post claiming that MyS^H^H^HSun had “begun to close source MySQL”. Luckily, Marten was able to set the knee-jerk cable-news-inspired Slashdot post straight by again explaining to the readers that MySQL is a business which has been able to build a great free, open, GPL database by creating value they don’t necessarily give away. He’s candid about the fact that they are experimenting trying to arrive at the best business model that balances all the elements of the above equation. Obviously, it’s not easy and someone’s undoubtedly going to get upset with the result. Apparently some people on Slashdot think MySQL’s database is written by monks who are morally opposed to any compensation.

Why is this important? Well, because software doesn’t build itself. Another admirable (if slightly more outspoken) guy named Marc Fleury made a big point of that with JBoss’ “Professional Open Source” business model. Everyone got what they wanted: the community got a great, free, open J2EE app server, and JBoss got paid to hire more people to continue to build it.

Recently there were a few examples of failed companies in the management space which either directly used open source or had some connection to it in their businesses. Many wonder if the failure had something to do with open source, their choice of license, or the business model. Few (if any) looked at the more obvious part: the products offered by those companies. Just because something is free and open source, it doesnt mean people will flock to it. Without that first element of the equation, there’s no adoption and no opportunity to create value people will pay for. The result is a failed business. The formula for creating that value is still being developed and is different for every company. We’ve chosen one which so far has brought us much success, but might not work for others.

Much like MySQL, we’re eager to experiment with different ways in which we can deliver the best products to the largest audiences while delivering financial success for our employees and investors. Over the course of this year, you’ll see us continue to enhance and deliver more features and functionality to our open source platform, while continuing to enhance the value of our various subscription offerings. Also like MySQL, we’re eager to engage our community directly as we experiment and learn how to continue to build the best solution to managing large scale web infrastructure.

Over the course of the last 9 months or so, my perspective has changed a bit due to two reasons. First, Hyperic is fortunate to count some of the largest players in the social networking space (Hi5, CNET, plus a few we haven’t announced yet) as well as some of the most significant enterprise and software-as-a-service players (Comcast, Dice, Intuit, and many others) as customers. This puts us in the unique position of being able to see how both of these seemingly different types of companies are tackling some of the same problems. The second reason is because I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking to my good friend, advisor, and Hyperic board member Bob Bickel. Bob’s new company Ringside Networks, launching this week, is focused on building technology that bridges the gap between social and business applications and does so through an open source product offering.

Rather than provide another recap of what Ringside does, I encourage folks to check out Matt Asay’s great writeup on his blog. Instead, I’ll offer up some commentary on why the “Social Application Server” concept makes sense, and how it might relate to Hyperic at some point in the future.

There’s a lot of talk these days about social networking and SaaS ‘platforms’. Companies expose API’s to their services and encourage people to build integrated apps which leverage the power of a CRM (like Salesforce) or social (like OpenSocial or Facebook) platforms into their apps. The nature of this integration typically involves two applications running on separate infrastructure, talking through the Internet through some variant of REST or web services. Aside from Salesforce’s Force platform, the majority of the integration between these sorts of apps is done on the outer layers of an application. An app can devote an IFrame or some other piece of screen real estate so it can display content from a platform, or perhaps use Javascript calls to embed functionality. Even in cases like Force (where there’s a richer API which can be embedded at any layer of the application), the interests of the platform provider (especially those of ad-driven social networking sites) restrict the ability of a customer of the platform to more deeply integrate the content from a social app into theirs. Ringside’s open source Social Application Server is meant to remove that restriction.

What does this have to do with Hyperic? Well, for a long time we’ve been looking at the emerging problems of managing large scale web applications whose content and functionality is not entirely under control of a single provider. If you’re a downstream customer of one of these platforms, how do you react to it’s availability or proper performance? If you’re a provider of a platform, how do you measure the usage of your API such that you can scale effectively without compromising your own site’s performance? There’s a lot of infrastructure in between the two applications that can fail. If the integration is done at the wrong level of the application, the entire experience of on both sides of the application might be compromised. These are the types of scenarios which will become more and more common, and will benefit from having an open piece of middleware which can help build richer, more robust applications which tie into social platforms. Developers can build richer integration, customers get a richer experience using the application, and providers of the application can build integration into these services that lets them maintain control of their customers experience.

We wish Bob and the Ringside team the best of luck, and are eager to see how our customers can benefit from their technology!

The article seemed innocent enough until I ran into this quote from the CEO of Dallas-based startup Mile Meter:

During the first dot-com boom, he said, “It was a badge of strength to have as much as possible in house. “Now, unless that is your core business…it’s a liability.”

Hmmm… I think the dot-com era statement was a bit over the top. Realistically, there was no real alternative to in-house infrastructure management. The hosting business was itself developing almost simultaneously and it was a dumb idea to simply hand over management of your entire setup to a 3rd party. Of course, you also needed tons of expensive gear to run stuff too. Well, it turns out today you still need tons of gear (assuming you’re successful anyway) and while it’s cheaper, the gear itself is only part of the problem.

But it’s the second part of the statement that I have deep issues with (and I am perfectly open to the possibility of it being taken out of context). The idea that you have to be in the business of managing technology assets in order to justify not going the EC2/S3 route (and it must be stated that EC2, while tres-cool is still in beta) seems short sighted. In fact, it counters completely the idea that operational excellence delivered through a talented ops team and a good infrastructure is a competitive advantage. It certainly is for the big, established players in the business — including Amazon.com. Tim O’Reilly wrote about this a while back when discussing how operations is the new “Secret Sauce” of companies doing business over the web.

Of course, perhaps part of the value of the S3/EC2 offering is that you tap into Amazon’s ops excellence. From what I have seen from playing with it, all you get is virtualized storage and virtual machines which have some lifecycle tooling around them. In effect, hosted gear. No monitoring, no application management, no person to call to debug why your memcache setup isn’t performing, and perhaps most important… no SLA (not for EC2 yet, anyway).

EC2/S3 save you hardware and storage costs. Everything else regarding operations skill, capacity planning, scalability knowledge, and good setup techniques still hold true for any business which derives its revenue from the web.

From both a personal as well as a business perspective, this deal makes a lot of sense. On the personal front, Mark, Ryan, Charlie, and company took the good part of Covalent 1.0′s brand and Apache focus and built a good business out of it (one which also happens to be a long standing Hyperic partner for its Apache/Tomcat subscription). I am extremely pumped to see these guys continue to succeed by joining up with the folks at SpringSource. On a business front, this gives SpringSource even more credibility than it currently enjoys within the Apache community. Covalent (1.0 & 2.0) invested a lot of money, time, and effort in supporting the ASF and its products while it figured out how to make a business. SpringSource can now leverage that in combination with a new approach to building enterprise applications based on Spring, Tomcat, and a number of other Apache technologies which Covalent has been delivering support for.

Covalent’s original business plan (the 1.0 days) laid the foundation for what exists today despite the fact that the business model which powered the original company was ultimately unsuccessful. Back then, we (a number of other very smart and dedicated people worked their tails off to make it work) tried applying old rules to a fundamentally new game all while enduring a harsh economic climate. The idea that money could be made while supporting and yes, commercializing Apache has always made sense to a lot of people. The mechanism employed was the real trick. Covalent 1.0 was a products business around a pervasive product that was at the end of the day different than the one we sold. Two things that come to mind from those days are customers saying “hey, can you support my Apache? Here’s the apxs” and me thinking “man, how hard can it be to support something that doesn’t randomly break?”. In the end, the choice to support any Apache (including yours), the emphasis on Tomcat, and a ton of hard work led Covalent 2.0 to success. It’s good to see them pair up with SpringSource to truly maximize the potential.

From our end, its a great sign that our former colleagues are now paired up with our new partners with the promise of great results. We share investors, but at the end of the day are two companies focused on our respective markets. SpringSource will continue to deliver the best way of building enterprise applications on the best open source stack, and Hyperic technology will continue to be the best management solution for that stack.

First, the huge news about MySQL being acquired by Sun Microsystems… then the news about BEA being acquired by Oracle. The first deal is significant given the ‘imminent’ IPO that was expected by MySQL later this year. The second is significant if only because of the amount of bickering between BEA’s management team, Oracle, and their respective shareholders.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about both of these huge transactions is how they are presented on their websites! MySQL has the Sun deal front and center (as one would expect). BEA’s website has the same SOA-logic-gene-liquid thing they’ve been talking about for months, along with the now extremely overused (and BLUE!) ink floating on air image that’s part of their “Think Liquid” campaign. Where’s the blurb about the $8 BILLION acquisition of its soul by Oracle? Well, it’s in small print… down on the left hand corner of the site. Look closely! You’d think that for that amount of money, Oracle would have demanded a big Oracle Logo smack in the middle of the main page.

Makes you wonder how excited those guys are about joining the Oracle machine…

On a more positive note, Sun’s comments about MySQL continue to validate the importance of open source, as well as the unique role that MySQL plays in large scale web infrastructure.

From Jonathan’s Blog:

Both sets of customers confirmed what we’ve known for years – that MySQL is by far the most popular platform on which modern developers are creating network services. From Facebook, Google and Sina.com to banks and telecommunications companies, architects looking for performance, productivity and innovation have turned to MySQL.

This serves as a great example of why we here at Hyperic are focused on helping solve the ops challenges of large web applications, most of which use MySQL. Hearing Sun talk about MySQL in these terms rather than simply saying it’s the cheap/free database that you can use instead of Oracle is refreshing, and a great validation of a market that will continue to demand open, innovative solutions that arent simply rehashes of old technology delivered under a lower cost business model.

Jesse’s post mentions Hyperic as one of 3 tools that made his first week at his new gig Etelos easier. The best part about it was that not only did he list us, he also called out three of the most important features of HQ. Namely Auto-Discovery (because frankly manually telling a monitoring system what to watch is sooo 5 years ago), heterogeneous support (not sure what Etelos is running, but my guess is he’s into seeing deep into the application stack, not just reacting to what’s broken), and Nagios integration (hey, you put all that work into Nagios, how about having HQ *integrate* it rather than asking you to throw it out). All three of these things are key elements to Hyperic HQ and also happen to be areas where our upcoming 3.2 release will deliver even cooler results. Check out the 3.2 beta to see what I’m talking about.

As for his comment about the agent firewall issues, he’s right. We need one ip:port in each direction. Luckily it is encrypted HTTP traffic we’re dealing with, instead of lame SNMP (which makes all the security folks in the room angry). Jesse, HQ 4.0 (due out next year) will include one-way communication from the agent to make this step a non-issue. Thanks for sharing your success with HQ!

Case in point. Slashdot reported this morning that the game ICO, an excellent (if moderately popular) game for the Playstation 2, contains GPL code in the form of libarc and zlib. In both cases, they are pieces of both of these libraries with modifications. Nonetheless, it suggests to me that the developer of the game was relying on the idea that it’s actually quite hard/impossible/illegal to dissasemble a game binary to hide their use of open source code. Perhaps there wasnt any malice here, and the developer(s) simply didnt know about the terms of use of this code. Regardless, it makes me wonder how many other places this is happening. Not just in games, but also in all kinds of other software.

I personally dont believe that all software should be open source. That’s a matter of choice for the developer of the software. However, the prospect of having people ripping OSS projects off by taking their code (as has happened even in our own segment of the industry) and packaging it up without abiding by the license is… well… crap. It’s something I recall Marc Fleury from JBoss being quite vocal about in the past… the idea that open source developers shouldnt get ripped off.

Too bad not many people cared about ICO. I bet if it was a higher profile game, this’d be bigger news.

The problem gets further compounded when one of these “Gatekeepers” is also a platform or stack vendor. See, it’s hard to resist the temptation of delivering the absolute best management for IBM products from a Tivoli solution while shortchanging non-IBM ones. Or, to lay this on one of the aspiring members of the big 4… how about getting support for SQL Server on Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. Hmmm… I’m gonna guess it sucks because Oracle wants you using their database. Besides, who uses OEM that isnt already an Oracle db customer?

Lucky for us, Hyperic has always aspired to be a completely independent management software company. We figure its important for us to deliver the best management solution for whatever technology you’ve chosen. Case in point, Mosso, a Hyperic enterprise customer was recently interviewed regarding their use of virtualization technology from VMWare. The key point from this interview was the fact that they’re open to switching to a different virtualization platform based on their requirements. Lucky for them, Hyperic will be delivering Xen support (as well as OracleVM) as soon as the Xen folks finalize their management API’s (c’mon guys, we’ve been waiting a long time) so their management solution will be in lockstep with their technology choices.

Last week, some of the best and brightest open source companies in the bay area congregated at Hyperic Headquarters, and played a spirited game of Wii Tennis to vie for the title of Open Source Champion and its prize: The Golden Racket.

The title gives it away, Hyperic won. Specifically, Scott Feldstein (aka scottmf) rose to the occasion and took the prize:

It was a great event though – and although winning was nice, it was made even nicer by getting to blow off some steam and socialize with the other companies that came. Thanks to JasperSoft, MuleSource, Marketcetera (apparently hosting next time!) and MySQL for making the event so fun. Here are some photos for your enjoyment:

We used our new, unbuilt space to host the event. Part housewarming, part wii-fest!

Zack Urlocker from MySQL had the great idea of adding Guitar Hero to the mix. So much fun!

That’s me on the guitar. Let’s just say I’ve had a little practice…

This is actually Scott playing (left) tennis. Although this was taken earlier in the night, we can see Scott was well on his way to his winning streak.

Thanks again to everyone for coming to such a fun night. I look forward to the next round of defending the Golden Racket!

Watch for an updated date and time on the evite.

See you next week sports fans.

As we approach Halloween, Hyperic continues its ‘tradition’ of bringing the daily challenges of web operations folks to the limelight by creating a contest to share these “Nightmare on Web Street”. The winning story will get a Nintendo Wii so they can kill time while waiting for the next crisis event. The contest begins today. To apply, submit a short essay (no more than 500 words) at www.hyperic.com/community/nightmare by 11:59 pm on October 30th, 2007. We’ll post all eligible stories on the site within 24 hours of submission, and on Halloween, the Hyperic team will vote for and announce the winner.

So, if you’re an ops guy, sys admin, or one of those multi-talented overworked IT folks with a good disaster story, share it! We’ll have a good time reading it and you just might win a Wii.

I am excited to say that we have achieved that beyond our own expectations. In order to prove that to ourselves, we provided our release candidate for Hyperic HQ 3.1 Enterprise to our early access customers last week. As a part of this final stage of our QA process, we upgraded a very large production environment (in a matter of a few hours, I might add). This setup manages about 650 machines and about 12,000 resources. Every minute it collects more than 14,000 metrics for the availability, performance, throughput, and utilization of a very diverse set of technologies.

After the upgrade to the 3.1.1 Release Candidate, the performance of the primary HQ Server supporting this infrastructure improved 500%. See for yourself:

This chart shows a dramatic drop in CPU utilization coinciding with the upgrade. The fact that the CPU was pegged with 3.0.5 represented how truly taxed the system was, especially considering the scale of the environment. The massive delta represents how the dedication and talent of our engineering team helped continue to push for improvements in what we internally refer to as the BRE edition of HQ. One of the cool aspects of working in open source is that we can be transparent with the improvements and challenges we face with our products, and sharing this type of data is a perfect example of it.

Think about it. IT Management (even just plain old monitoring) is a moving target of changing technologies, standards, and methods. Further, the method and pace at which these technologies get deployed is also constantly evolving and different at every company or scenario. Framing new solutions like those profiled in the BOSSie writeup strictly from the standpoint of whether they prove worthy contenders to this battle royale with the Big 4 is insufficient. The real measure should be how well each product solves the customer’s pain. This pain, by the way, might not be described in ITIL terms, or latched to SNMP MIBs. Folk’s who use Hyperic to manage their data centers want products which anticipate problems, help answer questions, and above all else, don’t get in the way.

I’m eager to see Hyperic (and any other product in our category), be reviewed from that standpoint.

When I do have time, I no longer feel the story is as interesting as when I first had the idea. Invariably, someone else has beaten the topic to death or changed the course of discussion.

Dave had a great post today involving a weird confluence of muffins, a oldsma-buick, hookers and a plea for someone to send him $40. Somehow, he even managed to throw a jab at Windows Vista as well.

Years of unusual experiences in the Tenderloin have given me a few more ideas on what the $40 could be for:

1. I think that’s about what the odds for the Appalacian State-Michigan game would’ve been if the guy bet a nickel.
2. Perhaps Extreme Pizza now delivers to Oldsma-buicks, and the delivery guy was complaining the customer didn’t have exact change.
3. The Tenderloin sports a unique type of “stock”, it could be an TenderTrade gone wrong.
4. Perhaps the driver was an irate lawyer from the music industry trying to squeeze money from the woman who was illegally downloading songs to entertain her “corner”.
5. Maybe the driver was that famous Nigerian spammer looking for his oil money, and obviously drilling in the wrong place.

Then again, maybe it was all about muffins…

Back in the dawn of the online era (1999 which seems like a million years ago), Yahoo had one of the first publicized outages which made headlines in part because it was already a public company. Keynote Systems, makers of one of the first external service level monitors, made a name for itself that day by being the first to detect the Yahoo outage and introducing to the world the idea that the availability of tier-1 sites like Yahoo can serve as a benchmark for that of other perhaps lesser-known web properties.

Things have evolved quite a bit since those days, of course. The amount of highly interactive, rich applications delivered over the web is increasing at a ridiculous pace and all these apps (Skype included) are built on a much more complex set of underlying technologies. In order to stay in front of these types of outages (which can cost millions), operations needs to thing not just in terms of availability, but also performance and scalability of every layer of the stack. Merely measuring URLs from various points in the globe and reacting to when things are down can cost a company its reputation in the market… especially when people depend on these services as part of their businesses. All this makes me wonder what Skype runs to monitor and manage their global setup…

I know I am biased, but perhaps they should check out Hyperic HQ.

First, as a sister investment company (XenSource and Hyperic are backed by Accel Partners and share Larry Augustin as a board member), I am excited for them and their new prospects. They’ve done an outstanding job of going pedal-to-the-metal and delivering a stand-out product and an exceptional valuation to their employees and investors. I wish them all the best with the new opportunities in this next chapter of growth. XenSource has ambitious plans and a ripe market opportunity, and their newly minted relationship with Citrix will ideally enable it to compete even more effectively in this emerging market.

As expected, this has caused all kinds of conversation and speculation on the impact this has on open source companies in general, including ours. The blogosphere seems full of speculation on open source vendors being squashed by proprietary vendors, are they “selling-out”, or worse, is this the only expected outcome for open source companies? No on all counts.

In his blog on CNET, my good friend Matt Asay references a recent comment made by Tim O’Reilly:

I will predict that virtually every open source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company.

In fairness, Tim did not call this out in response to XenSource but well before it. As Matt explains:

Tim believes that open source, at least as defined by open-source licensing, has a short shelf life that will be consumed by Web 2.0 (i.e., Web companies hijacking open-source software to deliver proprietary Web services) or by traditional proprietary software vendors.

In other words, why don’t I just give up, sell out, and go home? I guess I would if I thought that Tim were right. He’s not, not in this instance.

I agree. Open source is a hot-bed for technology innovation. It’s prediliction for fast customer adoption, product cycles measured in months (not years), and community collaboration breeds high growth. Customers are empowered to know how to solve their problems faster. They like it. In any market where innovation is fed and adoption grows, an acquisition is a serious possibility. That said, no CEO I know in open source or otherwise sets out to sell out. Venture investors worth doing business with smell this a mile away, and would never back a company that’s designed to be flipped. They back entrepreneurs that have an idea and a purpose and are driven to take it as far and as wide as they can. The idea is to grow as much as you can and have as many options as you want – including acquiring companies yourself.

Open source companies are growing in numbers and in size. As they grow, they naturally have more options today than they did a year ago. We’re seeing an increasing number of acquisitions – both proprietary backed and some open source backed – but we will soon see an increasing number of IPOs too. MySQL (another Benchmark sister company) is hopefully setting an example for others to follow. What is most interesting though is that proprietary companies are feeling the pressure to engage and can no longer dismiss the efforts of OSS companies as science experiments. The quick win is to buy into open source, the longer road is to embrace it and repackage/relicense existing code under open source licenses and build a community. By and large, we’re seeing even more of the latter – more companies trying to evolve into a faster paced, more modern business model. And open source is a part, but not all of it.

So no, I do not think this marks another open source company going dark. I think it affirms that open source will be a strategy the majority will adopt to stay relevant and appealing to customers. The fact that VMWare had a tremendously successful IPO also proves that open source is not the only way one can drive a huge outcome for a software company. As I’ve stated repeatedly: innovation and customer success are the proof points that make all the difference, open source is a business strategy option that can speed that success.

As for who else was selected, we are in a class with some very respectable competition:

Best System Management Tool
Hyperic: Hyperic HQ 3.1
Splunk, Inc.: Splunk 3.0
The OpenNMS Project: OpenNMS

I plan to personally be at the LinuxWorld showfloor for the judging and the award ceremony, at 4 pm on Tuesday in the Ask The Experts area. Please come by and visit us at booth #1144, by the Novell Email Garden. We’ll be showing off our latest – hopefully award winning – release.

And, as if free demos of great software that will save you time and money isn’t enough, we’ll be raffling off a snazzy new iPhone, and giving away T-shirts. Please come by and check us out!

For a complete list of award finalists check out IDG’s press release.

One quote got me thinking though:

“Open source is breathing new competitive life into systems management, ultimately forcing the established vendors to respond in their products, pricing and strategies. Open source could give potential challengers the cost and ease-of-implementation advantages they need to take on such formidable opponents.” said Raven Zachary, the Open Source Research Director at The 451 Group.

Originally, I admit, I thought that the Big 4 management products were too bulky, and their large enterprise business model approach was becoming antiquated in today’s evolving world of subscription-based, value driven software. However, the more I think about my previous blog post on the definition of enterprise, the more I recognize that they were simply built for a different purpose. They were built for classic ERP style systems management. Their business model matches the software they provided solutions for. Their complex framework is a reflection of the ERP vendors level of management instrumentation.

Today, through success with both paying customers and community adoption, I am convinced that its not that we’re as much displacing the Big 4 with rip-and-replace projects. Its more that our innovation, ease-of-use, and design for fast time-to-value is built for a new problem. An undefined market landscape. Customers coming to us repeatedly say they couldn’t invest in OpenView or Tivoli, regardless of how big their pocketbooks were, because their solutions weren’t built to solve their problems. See, Hyperic users typically have a hybrid stack of technology – some open source, some commercial, and a lot of their own. Typically, they have built a system that provides some service – a service where the technology is the business, and the business is the technology.

This tight coupling of the technology and business means that – it needs to continue to evolve (change, agility) to keep up and attract new users, it needs to be always on (high availability), and it typically embraces leading edge technologies (early adopters). All of these things the Big 4 were not designed to do. Essentially, this is a new market. I don’t believe Hyperic is replacing the Big 4, however what we are doing is succeeding where they can’t – in the fast-moving, always-on, aggressive market which represents a large percentage of new businesses and new projects within old businesses. Call it online services, Web 2.0 or simply web applications – the creation of this market opportunity is more likely to “wake up” the Big 4 to a more modern world of software innovation where they simply are not competing.

On this day, I encourage all you “users” out there to follow 10 simple rules to really show your appreciation:

1. Remember your password
2. Fix your printer yourself.
3. If you get the message “Critical System Updates Available”, don’t ignore it. Take the updates.
4. Don’t get your laptop stolen.
5. Use sudo, not root
6. If it was working yesterday, something changed. Fess up
7. Check to make sure its plugged in
8. RTFM
9. Don’t open that .exe your nice new stranger friend sent you.
10. If its 4:55 pm, let it go. It can wait until Monday.

***Edited to note that the above cartoon comes from www.xkcd.com – apologies for not giving credit from the beginning!

The day starts off with an apparent dead guy on a gurney in the street for 2 hours, being casually watched by a security guard with passersby actually taking phone camera photos like tourists.

Then there’s a Fruit of the Loom commercial being filmed on our corner, which, let’s face it, doesn’t exactly happen every day to you does it? Freaky fruit trying to pimp undergarments right where you work?

Then the power goes out. A manhole cover, reportedly on our corner exploded (although amazingly we didn’t hear the actual explosion) and took out power for most of downtown… although not in our office, which is good, because there is more action to come!

Now there is a RIOT two blocks away at a colo that houses MANY high profile web sites such as Craigslist, Six Apart’s Typepad and Live Journal blog sites, and Technorati… and Hyperic!

Fortunately, our site was spared. The reason for the outage and the riot? Not workers with free time due to a power outtage… According to my favorite newsource, Valleywag, a source close to the company says:

Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There’s an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum.

Typical, just when you think you’ve thought of everything for your (systems management) strategy, a drunk guy comes by and screws it all up.

The business world is a much more complicated place nowadays. There’s a lot of small players doing big things and big players doing small things. How do you know if your problem or requirements qualify you for an Enterprise solution? Is is the size of your company? The scale of your problem? The size of your checkbook? All 3? Something else?

What about those companies like Salesforce.com, Yahoo, Google, eBay? Are they Enterprise? If so, does that mean that the folks building the Facebook infrastructure should aspire to become Enterprise? My guess is no. They’re happy kicking butt and making money (as are most of the ambitious online and SaaS companies out there). All these companies have been successful in their technology endeavors by thinking through technology problems differently. Perhaps they’re “New Enterprise”. Built to scale, built with open source, built for agility.

Even the Wikipedia definition of Enterprise Software seems to equate the Enterprisey-ness (another new word) with the scope of use of the product (company-wide vs. departmental) and the difficulty of building the software (both cost and technical complexity).

Over here in Hyperic-land we try to look at the term Enterprise from the point of view of scale, complexity and agility, not of cost, accessibility, or even breadth of deployment. When we set out to build HQ we focused on a technical challenge of managing large scale heterogeneous systems and apps. As I mentioned in the past, we didn’t set out to build a better/cheaper Tivoli. In fact, we work with traditional Enterprises as well as a whole host of companies who don’t consider themselves Enterprise customers the way that financial giants like Deutsche Bank and Citibank do. The common thread here is that they all have Enterprise grade problems related to managing large scale (tens of thousands of managed resources), business-critical computing environments, with a focus on agility to keep up with their highly dynamic and ever-changing environments. The New Enterprise companies, have just as much (if not more) riding on the reliability of their infrastructure. They make technology choices differently (selecting open source and other more nimble technologies to build larger, horizontally scaled out solutions) as well as being far more inclined to roll their own tooling when it’s not available.

Having spent many hours with folks who maintain large scale environments at our ‘traditional’ Enterprise customers as well as those of our ‘New Enterprise’ customers I can tell you that their skill sets and expectations are exactly the same. No one says ‘this requirement matters less just because we’re a website and not a trading system’. Sure, their budgets are different perhaps, but not as much as some might think. As I’ve stated before, we don’t approach our customers with a price driven message. People want solutions to problems, they’re eager (ok, ok… willing!) to pay for the value they get.

Despite the parity between the requirements and expectations of these two different types of opportunities, there’s one aspect that stands out. Companies of the “New Enterprise” variety are typically not looking at legacy Enterprise Management technologies for use in their environments. I used to think it was a price issue. I’ve since come to the conclusion that its way more than that. They make technology choices differently, preferring solutions and companies that don’t impose their will on the environment being managed. They want a future-proof decision that leaves them free to evolve in whatever direction makes sense for them at the time. They also operate on an IT project time horizon which simply does not work for the yearlong implementation cycles most vendors deal with. Of course, price is an issue, but you only get to the price discussion if you’ve passed the technical evaluation.

Code releases aside, there’s nothing that can be more satisfying to either myself or any of my co-founders than the results of that important transition in our business. We wanted to create an open source project and community, hire the best people, and grow and maintain our customer base. Normally startups have trouble doing one thing really well, yet we’ve managed to  do all three with stellar results.

Nothing can replace the feeling of watching the first trickles of community activity on our site and how those have grown to the thousands of active users we have today. Similarly, the experience of such rapid growth in our team, where we’ve added close to thirty of the most talented people in the software business while recruiting in an extremely competitive environment. But perhaps the most amazing thing is the impact this has had on our customer base. Over the last year we’ve grown our customer base to include some of the best names in the business. Companies like Microsoft, Comcast, StubHub, Intuit, and many more are using HQ technology to manage complex web infrastructure environments. Each of these companies are challenged with huge systems management tasks, and each of them picked Hyperic over every other solution out there – confident in our technology to solve their problems not cheaper, but better than anything else. Endorsement like that is something we likely never could have achieved so quickly without releasing our Hyperic HQ as open source and building such a powerful community.

Along the way we’ve learned how to listen to our community and our customers as we build a better product. Prior to releasing our product as open source, it was impossible to have this type of feedback. Now, I can’t imagine how we ever got things done without it. With that in mind, I would like to thank everyone who helped make this year possible – our board, our employees, our community, our customers, our partners and all our friends out in there in the media/blogosphere who’ve helped spread the word: Dave Rosenberg, Matt Asay, Denise Dubie, Michael Cote, Dan Kuznetsky, Jack Loftus, Charlie Babcock, Andi Mann, Raven Zachary, Rachel Chalmers… and many, many more.. Thank you all, and I am looking forward to the next year!

We tested each product’s ability to discover, manage, administer, monitor, report on, diagnose, troubleshoot, reset, reconfigure and secure our network devices, applications, servers and clients.

Barry’s test scored Hyperic’s Open Source software a 3.6 on a scale of 5, and in the middle of the other two vendors. (Lowest a 3.1, highest a 4). We didn’t win the clear choice award, but we’re actually very proud of this review! Why? Well, Barry spent some time with us yesterday and talked about the two things he thought we needed to succeed – group alerting and automatic control actions. When we discussed that these were in the enterprise version, he suggested we take our Enterprise software to compete in the commercial arena. (Which we will, providing the editor gives us the chance!)

Knowing this, and knowing we have even more packed into the Enterprise Extensions we’re very happy with this review. But it does beg the question – if those features make the functionality more complete, then why are they not open source? Don’t we want to win every bake-off contest?

We’re not interested in trading off between bake-off contests and a solid business plan that has enabled us to win in the market, and the market to win with us. See, we designed HQ to be the easiest to install, fastest time-to-value, and functionally complete software on the market today. Both our open source and our enterprise subscription offerings clearly illustrate that. Our users, customers, and partners agree. In fact, a lot of commercial open source projects out there make money on manageability of their systems, like JBoss, MySQL and MuleSource who all use Hyperic to provide value to their users.

So we are not bummed we didn’t win. It’s our plan to be an innovative, focused open source software provider for systems management that provides the absolute best-in-class software for the demanding scale and complexity of online services businesses. Our open source users can get a complete systems and application management solution up and running quickly – and when they get to an appropriate level of scale (usually in excess of 100 machines), it actually becomes more cost effective to engage us for our subscription offering which is tailored specifically for their needs and provides the fastest time to value in the business. And even with the paid-for software, it’s still the most cost effective, comprehensive, and downright sexy software they can own in this space. Period. And being cost-effective for our customers means that we get paid, and ensures our open source’s projects longevity and ensuring the advancement and sophistication of the software for our customers. It’s a fundamental principle of our business plan which ensures that everyone in the Hyperic ecosystem is a winner. Go ask our ever-growing community of users and customers if you’re curious.

• FAA Computer Glitch Causes Flight Delays – read full article
• United Airlines suffers computer glitch – ZDNET Blog

I don’t know the specifics of these “glitches” but I suspect you really can’t blame the computers. A couple of decades of working with computers tells me that computers are pretty binary. They either work or they don’t, and which way it goes depends exactly on what you tell it to do. Now, no IT professional is going to tell a computer on purpose to wipe out the airline industry for a few hours or any other business, but it happens all the time. Why? They lacked the timely information to help them get sufficiently ahead of the problem.

This is exactly the purpose that we built Hyperic HQ for – to help IT organizations monitor, collect and make sense of complex information systems. The idea being, that you don’t just want to know when your system fails – you want to know long before so you have the time and the right information to get ahead of it. This is what hi5 did to get ahead of their systems growth. They aren’t responsible for the safety of millions of people flying around, or trying to, but they have the 10^th most trafficked website in the world and take their business, social networking, very seriously. They implemented HQ to not only collect performance data, but also determined their business metrics – such as number of downloads of a media file – and correlated that to their performance. This way, as usage grew, they had historical information to plan their growth. They also set up a system of threshold alerting, so they know when a feature, server, or platform is performing worse then usual, and if there is no usage differentiation, they know they need to get to the bottom of it – and they have the time and the information to do so before an outage occurs. This kind of information is likely what the operations team of the FAA and United would tell you is really the problem. Its not a “computer glitch” its an “information glitch” or, more specifically, a “lack of information glitch.”

And if you want to find out more about how hi5 runs their IT shop with maximum availability using Hyperic HQ, check out the case study: Hyperic – hi5 Case Study

“One of the odd things about the three new wave players is that, of the three, only one (Hyperic) supports Windows natively.”

Yes, we do – and Microsoft loves us for it! In fact, they are even a customer! Their Open Source labs are loving us as well… stay tuned for a podcast we did with them to be posted on port25 soon.

Microsoft support is very important, and interesting – but what’s even more interesting is that most open source system management providers don’t provide direct support for the technologies they manage. They stop at supporting operating systems (and as Jack points out, limited ones at that) and a few databases. They take the easy way out letting the users of their products to manually configure, code and compile their way through hooking their systems up. This drags out the process of implementing a systems management solution and also adds significantly to the hidden costs. Hyperic currently supports 46 different technologies across the full enterprise stack – web servers, application servers, middleware servers, virtualization servers, databases, networks and operating systems – and supports them immediately on installation. Auto-discovers them, in fact, so you don’t have to play connect the dots with your management system. And we’re going to be supporting a lot more VERY soon… We’re going to be using our new investment money to rapidly increase our inventory of supported products, both commercial and open source, so you don’t have to – so you can go back to the more important aspects of managing your business, not your machines.

… also, we have a VMware image, too – what’s even cooler about that is we don’t just exist inside the VM, we can actually manage the VM environment as well.

SysAdmins spend a great deal of their time online whether fighting fires, reading up on the latest cool tool to hit the market, or checking up on Paris Hilton and her shenanigans (as if they had time to do this!). It’s unfortunate to loose a print publication that lets them, and those of us who serve that market, have a deeper conversation about topics that can help them do their job better. It will be sorely missed by many people.

But, 3 other things I can think of all generally focus on the sheer speed of innovation and success with Open Source:

1. By establishing and cultivating an open source community, you are much closer to your users. Their demands, ideas, and creative solutions are apparent to you much more quickly then in proprietary powerpoint-danced based solutions, where customers may not actually use the product for up to 9 months from the moment they start talking to you. This keeps vendors inline much more efficiently with the rapidly evolving requirements of their users.
2. Open Source users are more open to new and innovative functionality and they are downright eager to participate in the end stages of its development. There is a fine line to walk here, but essentially you can usually release much earlier betas of your product and get a wider set of usage scenarios vetting the quality of the software much faster then in the proprietary world where software hides behind a dark curtain of mystery until its released. Of course, this is not to be abused! If your betas are inherently broken the community will shun them. Ultimately if used right, the company and the community benefit from faster time to market for product development.
3. As a vendor, its incredibly rewarding to see and hear of your successes, whether commercial or not, so quickly. We released our 3.0.5 release of Hyperic HQ this week and I already have heard MULTIPLE comments from open source users and customers alike about how much they like the improved performance in their large scale deployments. Its been out almost 24 hours. Sure, some of that has to do with our upgrade model – but it has just as much to do with the openness of the community we support.

3 things to stray away from:

1. Building something cool shouldn’t be rocket science to use. Pay close attention to usage scenarios, common navigation and interpretation models. If your user is not a developer already – they probably won’t start installing by doing a compile. If you want fast adoption, requiring 2 weeks of training or months of professional services is one sure way to lose their attention and good faith.
2. Open Source is not a free ride to put out poor quality software. Just because they don’t pay for it, doesn’t mean that quality isn’t important. I know I said in #2 above that they are much more tolerant, but its no excuse to deliver something that doesn’t even turn on without command line flags, running in debug mode, or with constant error screens popping up everywhere. Your users will work with you, but don’t take them for granted.
3. Although surprisingly common, if you base your software business model on services alone for revenue, or even greater then 25% (completely arbitrary number), you are in trouble. One, its going to take you a LONG time to get critical mass of deployments. Two, its going to constrain your growth to hiring an army of professional services who you trust to be consistently as smart as you and as versed in your project. Three, its likely going to slow or stop your ability to generate real improvements to your project. Fixes may happen in the context of specific use cases but real innovation and extensions are going to be highly subject to a slow period in services… during which you aren’t making any money or growing! Not to mention you will likely be closer to airline staff then your own family, because of the rigorous travel schedules.

In our case, Hyperic already had a great product and a business that, short of the code being open source and the community being nurtured, proved the necessary scale and durability that’s necessary to exist in what is perhaps the most lucrative, yet fractured market in the software business. The first round of investment helped us prove that HQ was not only a great product for end customers, it would also thrive in a community of users who could use it, extend it, and influence its evolution. That investment also paired Hyperic’s founding team with investors who know how to help grow companies as well as know as much as any investor can know about the nascent world of commercial open source. Money alone doesn’t do it. Experienced investors, good corporate governance, and aggressive execution are what makes the difference between what investors would call “lifestyle businesses” (a blanket term for any deal they’re not interested in), and rocket ship success.

Now we begin the second chapter (or is it the third!) of the experience. We have a world class team of people, the best product in the business, and a proven model for delivering software through open source while creating a financially viable, customer-focused company. The continued support and investment from Benchmark and Accel will help support an aggressive expansion plan for the next wave of innovation in systems management. We’re just getting started!

First, let me say I’m inherently skeptical of anything labled as a “Think Tank”. I think naming an event like that almost sets it up for missed expectations. Luckily the event was a success, even if the name was a bit overstated! Congratulations to Andrew Aitken and Mark Radcliffe for organizing a gathering of this type.

The event covered a lot of topics and the Olliance Group already wrote the comprehensive summary, so I’ll recap the highlights for me personally:

• Enterprise customers don’t buy ‘open source’, they buy solutions to their problems – This was the most reassuring observation which was presented and widely endorsed by the panel of enterprise CIOs. Some went as far as arguing that if the opening line of a pitch was “we’re open source” and the substance was weak (or equivalent to that of a more reputable vendor) you’re not getting any money from them. Cost reduction was viewed as a bonus over workable, deployable solutions to real problems. Enterprise customers are open to participating in communities and are eager to reap the benefits…. but they don’t care about having access to the source code of a product or participating as much as some would like to think. Further, the more time and energy is spent in chasing the definition of what ‘true open source’ is, the more OSS vendors are viewed as sandal-wearing zealots and subsequently written off.
• Bottom-up sales models are difficult/impossible in the enterprise – Part of the argument for commercial open source is that you build a leaner sales process which starts with direct access to the technology and ideally results in a smooth engagement with a customer willing to pay for whatever you offer (as long as it meets the need). This means most open source companies have little or no tolerance for expensive, long sales cycles. Ironically, these are the standard MO for enterprise customers. POC’s, RFP’s, onsite pre-sales support, etc. are all things we expect to mitigate by giving prospects access to the technology *before* we even engage. Unfortunately, this is still difficult to pull off. It’s hard for a startup vendor of open source technology to resist playing what amounts to ‘someone else’s game’ when competing dollar for dollar with a competitor which can’t leverage the frictionless adoption model of OSS.
• The GPL is the most used, yet least understood license – We’re GPL. I was curious and informally polled both vendors and customers about their impressions of the GPL. I was amazed by the response. First, the ‘viral’ question. No one seems to be able to give a consistent answer to when GPL does or doesn’t “taint” a related piece of technology. Second, the issue of GPL licenses and copyright and IP ownership. Customers and vendors still don’t seem to get the notion that open sourcing technology does not immediately relinquish your ownership of it. The use of the GPL makes this even worse, by suggesting that dual licensing is the only way ‘around’ this. This causes undue confusion by potential customers who spend time drafting ‘no-open-source’ policies.

And finally…

• Open source executives like to hang out with each other – This might seem obvious given the nature of the ‘tank, but because of the community driven nature of our business and the fact that there’s tons we’re still figuring out, it seems logical that we’d enjoy getting together.

In the end, there was good networking and the opportunity to share a few drinks and some good ideas with other industry folks. We’re still scratching the surface of this business model, and I’m glad that there are events like this that bring us vendors close to our potential customers and partners to keep us from drinking too much of our own Kool Aid.

EMA’s Andi Mann, recently told us that about a quarter of all implementations of virtualization are outside of test and development. And this number is growing quickly. This means that there are newfound pressures for production ready virtualization implementations to succeed – success factors that have typically been outside the realm of test and development environments. Two of the main drivers inadequately addressed by the market are security and systems management. Many people are picking up on the security – but what baffles me is people aren’t talking more about the systems management problem with this new architecture.

There exists a new “Virtual Divide” created by separating the applications inside the VM’s from the physical resources they consume. A new layer in the architecture leaves most systems management strategies ill-equipped to cross the divide. System Administrators are left with a forked, un-rationalized view of the performance and health of their systems, typically resorting to redeploying VM’s to larger partitions rather then really diagnosing or preventing problems before they occur. This becomes a giant game of “whack-a-mole”, and forces virtualization adoption to be slow and tempered in order to control the chaos. System Administrators generally have difficulty planning their adoption, and use caution to see if their applications are successful in the design that they laid out. What they need to be more confident and to achieve virtualization optimization is information and tools that are suited for this new architecture. In short, management of IT resources across this “virtual divide” requires a new type of systems management software.

Hyperic HQ fortunately has these capabilities, and we were able to adapt and extend our capabilities to close the virtual divide with our December release of Hyperic HQ for VMware. What is surprising though, is that we still have questions on this. I have regular conversations with customers who have a web infrastructure systems management problem and they are looking for Hyperic to help, only to find that they also have VMware installed and just think that they have to live with this disjointed virtual/physical world.

So, we wrote a whitepaper to explain it to everyone. If you are considering embarking on virtualization in a production, mission critical environment – whether you use Hyperic now or not – you will learn quite a bit about the challenges that lay ahead and the options to secure your success, and learn more about how to “Bridge the Virtual Divide” using a systems management strategy purpose-built for this new challenge. Download the whitepaper today.

Let me break out the real differences between the types of Open Source projects out there, and I will let you decide what kind of project you prefer.

Open Source 1997 — software available for the public domain generally built by users trying to solve a problem they have and offer up their solution in case someone else can use it. This is great, but it inadvertedly created two fundamental problems. One, in order to adopt the solution, you’d have to get your hands quite dirty. For example… step 1: untar the source step 2: ./configure step 3: make && make install. The software may not have designed by an engineer with an eye for ease of use, adoption, and reuse. In other words, it was not ‘productized’. This is OK, but it makes the tool generally awkward to adopt. The second problem is that it’s incomplete. It solved one users problem, and maybe a class of users can get mileage out of it. But it was designed as a band aid, not as an innovative, well thought out, BETTER solution to the problem. Maybe it copied old expensive software in the market place and made it a cheap alternative. Maybe it introduced a new approach, but left the barrier of adoption too high because, after all, who doesnt know how to compile stuff, right? Regardless, the end result is a hard to use, incomplete tool. So, two things now happen. Either it muddles its way out there in the ether, or a commercial company comes up behind it to commoditize it. They do this by persisting the idea that its hard to use and incomplete. Why? Because they sell services to address that problem. They are more then happy to perpetuate this hard to use model, and foster a dependency on themselves. Ultimately the user still gets that cheaper solution then the big proprietary option. But its definitely not better.

This is the common mentality of lackluster open source proprietors out there. They earn a bad rep for the company and put misguided ammunition in the hands of people who like to throw FUD on Open Source projects all around. It does however, give Dave Rosenberg amusing fodder to tear down those perceptions rather publicly in his blog

Here’s what’s really needed…

Open Source 2007 — innovative, easy to adopt software solutions, purpose-built for solving problems of scale. Scale being both the market size and the customer size. Designed for easy deployment, usage, and extensibilty – these software projects ultimately will be longer lived and more relevant at the end of the day. But they’re not incomplete and hard to use, so how can you make money? I get back to that little word at the beginning – scale. In open source, you design your projects so that 99.9% of your users are satisfied with what you give them and they are able to make their own judgement on whether the product meets their need. No sales pressure, no POC’s, no time-bombed trials. They may choose to join the community and give back, but they are essentially using the software for free. Most educated consumers of open source technology know that it’s not about the cost of the software, it’s about where the value is. The portion of users that have a larger scale problem and typically have a couple layers of management involved can get the front office, upstream folks to pay a modest fee. This is how successful companies like Jaspersoft and a number of others have been doing it for some time. They provide very flexible, standard reports for end users, and charge once the higher ups want more complex reporting authoring. This is how we do it, complete for the end user – but once senior management wants to enforce more complex management rules — we ask them to pay, and they usually do, happily. After all, they were budgeting to have to pay non-open source competitors anyway. The reason they’re happy to pay is because they know that there has to be a trade between the consumer and the provider in order for the relationship to really work. In mission critical computing environments, it has to work. Period.

BTW: As an aside, in case you haven’t been out on our forums lately, we’re serious about our respect for Jasper. We just entered an agreement two weeks ago and started a project with them. Because we’re both oriented to this type of flexibility and value creation, we’re about halfway through our phase 1 of integrating JasperReports into our Open Source summer release. We should have the first result for community review in about a week. Now that’s just cool!

For those of you who may not be as entertained, or irritated, by the lunatic process of watching the download numbers for projects as I am, let me enlighten you on how irrelevant these numbers really are by giving you some of the key plays of the game.

1. Too famous not to acknowledge, there’s the legend of the download server, where someone sets up a machine that continuously downloads their own project files, drastically inflating the numbers. This is a popular rumor, and maybe an urban legend, but it is so easy to conceive that it has to add a certain speculation of doubt to the entire process.
2. Next is the file number strategy. How many files do you need to download to get your software going? Project A may have 2 files for a complete installation, while project B has 4 – perhaps they force their users to download check files to even get that many. Project B could have double the downloads and appear the market leader, but really, they are playing at about even.
3. Then, you need to think about how often the project publishes new code. 100 people downloading a new build once a week for a month would look about the same or better then 400 people downloading a single build a month. But one project has a 100 users and the other 400.

I believe that community is the better measure, and should be the focus of any project’s success. How many people are using and working on the project is a real measure of the projects overall relevance and traction in the open market. Measuring how many questions are community asked and answered. Measuring contributions for code fixes, enhancements and, plugins – by both number and complexity. Documentation contributions – including best practices on how to implement, use or extend the project also have variations on complexity. How many people are using the product actively, and how broadly used and useful is it. These are the real questions and measure of success. Unfortunately, while somewhat transparent, these measures are not easily aggregated. Solid numbers are an objective measure that people like and unless the industry figures out how to compare community data better, download numbers are always going to be a part of the mix.

So, back to Safeway. When trying to figure out whats the best price from everything from soup to shampoo, pricing and packaging are typically meant to confuse the user. Lets take cold medicine as an example, a name brand has a bottle shelved right next to the generic store brand. The prices are off by pennies. But take a closer look, for the same relative price, the store brand offers 50 more pills. The bottles look the same, but the consumer has to look really hard at the bottles to figure out any differences. Its usually found with the quantity and dosage information – 1 pill of one equals 2 pills of the other, and one bottle comes with 50 more pills. In order to demystify this buying process for the shopper, Safeway put that clever little price per ounce on the pricing label below the products. This is the instant normalizer that lets you know when you’re getting ripped off or fooled.

This is what the open source community needs. Price per ounce for downloads. A normalized download counter. The first step will be to defraud the numbers as they stand. The second, and more important one, is to start measuring the heartbeat of the community. We’re eager to work with folks like Sourceforge.net, other OSS project hosting providers and projects themselves to help make this process as transparent as our businesses are.

1. Hyperic HQ on OS X. We’ve always made sure that HQ – both server and agent – worked on OS X, but we never contributed any time to getting it to launch at system startup. Some friends at Maccius (www.maccius.com), an MSP, wrote up some docs to do just that. You can view them here.
2. Patch for HQ bug. It turns out that HQ didn’t work as expected when gathering JMX data in certain situations. So, we were pleased when forums user ‘nickbr’ not only discovered the bug, but also submitted a bug fix. You can see his contribution here.
3. Plug-in for Asterisk. Asterisk is a great project for open source telephony software. And now, forums user ‘critch’ has contributed an Asterisk plugin so users can more easily manage their Asterisk deployment with HQ. Here’s a discussion about Asterisk plugin creation.
4. Users Answer Users: When the forum starts giving back and not only answering, but helping to contribute fixes to other users, you know you’ve got something good. Take Brad Felmey for instance, one of our super users who knows his way around the software and knows how to provide patches. Every project needs a Brad Felmey… or 10! Here’s an example of Brad helping other users (and even teaches John Mark something in the process!)

All of these things are what we had in mind when we released HQ under the GPL. In fact, it’s the driving force behind any open source software – a strong community will make or break a project. Some people like to brag about downloads as the penultimate metric of success, but it says nothing of how people are using it and interested in it. An active community will show the true heartbeat of a projects success.

That changed this past year – we signed some bigger OEM deals where JBoss, MySQL and MuleSource are now licensing and reselling our software for us, and making their software more manageable in the process. We got some funding from Benchmark and Accel, which enabled us to grow, and to go Open Source last July, something we had wanted to do since day one, but didn’t have the resources or the time to really do it. And now today, I sit here in our new office, surrounded by my fellow other 4 founders, and 15 new faces, celebrating our success and those of the hundreds of enterprises that now use our software.

A lot has changed over the past 3 years, and my fellow founders agree. This afternoon, my marketing sidekick, Stacey, played reporter around the office and summarized the reactions of my fellow founders nicely.

Doug MacEachern, CTO

“The roots of my career are in Open Source, with 7 years on Apache and mod_perl before I started on this project. When I started, the thing that appealed to me about this project the most was that it was a lot like why I thought Apache was such a popular project. It is an extensive problem which applies to a really wide audience, which makes it useful. But also, on the developer side it never gets boring. There are always new challenges. The past year has been great for me, because prior to the funding and going open source, we were frugal with all our time and money – it was all spent on existing customers. We wanted to go Open Source, but we never had the resources. Last year we made the switch, and while customers are still an absolute priority, we have more resources to expand and grow and support a community and expand to new stuff. A year ago, I never would have had the time to work on virtualization. This year, I got to work on both VMware and XenSource. That’s just cool.”

Charles Lee, VP of Engineering

“I think back to 3 years ago, and why we started this company, and I am pretty proud that the purpose is still the same. We saw this problem of web infrastructure management being unaddressed, and we went for it. What we didn’t see is how Web 2.0 and SOA would accelerate this problem so much in the past few years, and its really exciting that we are not only validated in the problem we set out to do, but we were ahead of a major trend that is now affecting so many companies.”

Ryan Morgan, Chief Architect

“I was motivated years ago by seeing the widespread failure of products in the system management space that took an army of consultants and engineers onsite to get going. I wanted to fix that by building that better mousetrap that sets itself up with reasonable defaults and real results right away. At Covalent, we basically got to do that – but only to version 1.0. By starting Hyperic, we got to do a lot more. That means that now I hear from customers about how they can’t believe that we can find all this information and see metrics right away. I love that they’re blown away by that, and that we continue to solve that problem better every day.”

John Sachs, Client Services

“Systems management is a fun and exciting area. We came at this knowing the problem, but perhaps not realizing how big it would be today. But we were confident in our abilities, and that anyone who tried our software would be blown away. My job is to work with customers in support, and I would say 50% of the time I see them live, or get them on the phone, I hear a great story about how HQ averted some disaster in their IT department. That always feels good.”

Don’t get me wrong, Open Source is an important business model that lowers the barriers to entry for both producers and consumers of projects. I believe it’s truly an integral piece of the new economics of the software business. At Hyperic we use the GPL v2, publish our source code on a publicly browseable subversion repo, and work on a transparent engineering process. But this is a licensing issue which, while very important, is sort of moot if you get the product questions all wrong. I think there are more important measures for what makes successful software, regardless of their open source status – what are you providing for the customer?

Here is my short list of success criteria:

• Software must be installed by the same audience that will use it. This means that for 99% of software products out there, it should be both intuitive and come with some sort of installer. If your documentation starts with “This will be really difficult” or “First step is ./configure && make && make install”, you have a problem, most likely in the form of angry, confused and support-dependent customers. Hand-assembling products by users is not power, it’s just a way to appeal to only those with enough time and skill to compile software. Not exactly a great way to start a meaningful customer relationship.
• Value of the software should be self-evident within an hour, preferably 20 minutes. Spending 6 months with a team of expensive consultants to get value, is unrealistic to expect from anyone these days. Actually, its obnoxious. So what if it’s free/open source/good for your health… people are busy, and projects and vendors should put serious effort into making their value clear to their adopters from the earliest part of the adoption cycle.
• Technology vision should reach further then solutions present in the market today. The ole’ 80% of the product for 20% of the cost is nice, but only if you are shopping for imitation perfume on the Home Shopping Network – or anything else that is exclusively a knock-off only market. If you want thought leadership and a company to partner with to lead your charge for solving your problems both today and tomorrow, you want someone with more than a thimbleful of innovation in their company. Look for real innovation – solving problems yet unadressed, or a bigger way then ever thought possible before. Remember, it’s supposed to be a “BETTER” mousetrap, not just a “FREE” one.
• Software with real and successful customers. When it all comes down to it, if customers aren’t using it and aren’t successful, then your product is fundamentally flawed whatever your business model. It’s the only conclusion. There’s a lot of noise out there in the open source market about the number of downloads being the meaningful benchmark. It’s eerily reminiscent of the late nineties… when “EYEBALLS” were what people valued over everything. If those eyeballs are not finding enough value in your offerings to pay you, then expect to find yourself next to an all too familiar sock puppet. Downloads are not the defining metric of success, as they can be gamed. Community participants and, frankly, customers matter more. This is, after all, a business. A business where the definition of value isn’t in the obscurity of code or process, but in real value to the customer.

If a company and its software meet these criteria, trust me, they’ll be successful, and everyone – users, customers, partners, and integrators alike – will want to work with them. The open source business model brings the additional benefits of a community of rabid fans and the clarity of conscience which comes from delivering value to customers that doesn’t come from erecting false barriers but from the success that the product enables.

Some companies, however, have been latching onto this idea and using it to mint their position in the market. They created a wikipedia entry on it even! They love the idea of being the “little 4″. I’m running out of ways to count the number of times companies claim an intent to “take on the big four enterprise management Goliaths—IBM/Tivoli, CA, Hewlett-Packard and BMC Software—by providing 80 percent of the functionality for 20 percent of the cost.”

Frankly, this is reflective of the lazy, losing proposition of setting low expectations, a common affliction for some open source vendors. Who wants to use a watered-down, cheap alternative to the real deal? And who says that the real deal is the big 4? Is it their market penetration? The billions of dollars spent every year milking support contracts for shelfware or software and services that never delivered? Sure, that’s success for them, but their users will tell a different story.

Hyperic HQ is not “OpenView, just cheaper” anymore than Apache is “IIS on the cheap”. HQ is unlike OpenView, and it’s unlike anything else on the market. OpenView is overly complex, it takes a small army to get running and the backing of a tyrant nation to fund it. Who wants a systems management solution that needs management? It lacks support for most of the relevant, modern software components in today’s Next Generation Data Center. Heard of Virtualization, HP? I didn’t think so. This is not Hyperic’s frame of reference, and it should not be the reference for any company out there looking to drive innovation into an existing space populated by lazy incumbents.

So, while its true many of today’s truly innovative companies are gravitating towards open source as a business model, that doesn’t mean you have to settle for less by using open source products. Look for real innovation out there – it exists, trust me. Open Source companies worth their salt use their own innovation, smarts and community to develop and evolve faster then anyone else – companies like MuleSource, Intalio, XenSource, Pentaho, Alfresco and, yes, Hyperic. They don’t just seek to duplicate existing solutions with different economics. Our buyers and users are smarter than that.

Don’t go for the poor man’s alternative, and definitely stay away from the rich man’s faux pas. Strive for something better.

The challenge will be putting forward the message about standards-compliant Linux such that ISV’s, Linux distributions, and OEM’s take heed. As an open source company, we certainly look forward to helping out with that initiative. It is helpful to release software that adheres to an industry standard and know that users of any Linux distribution – even those we may not have heard of, let alone support – can install, configure, and fully deploy our software. This will be good for Linux as well as Open Source in general.

This gets to a larger point: if proponents of Linux want it to gain a larger share of data center deployments and remain the default platform for open source development, something will need to change. A few somethings, in fact. As long as more and more open source projects have native Windows, OpenSolaris, and (insert platform here) versions, the pressure will be on Linux distributions to make life easier for developers. Here’s a brief list of things preventing Linux from world domination:

1. Manageability. Of course we would say that, being the open source systems management company :) At this time, there is simply no simple way of getting system and application-level information out of a running Linux system. I’ll try to provide more detail on this subject later, but I’ll ask this – ever tried to get data out of a threaded application on Linux? That’s hard enough. Now try correlating that data to system-level events. Linux developers could learn a thing or two from Java with its JMX hooks.
2. Differences in library versions from Linux distro to distro. Ever tried to install an RPM on Fedora that was designed for SUSE? Try developing an app and automating your build process to accommodate that.
3. Differences in package managers. There are currently 2 primary flavors of Linux package managers, although there are multiple efforts to create an overarching package management solution. That day cannot come too soon.
4. Lack of a cohesive effort around the “Linux brand”. Hopefully, with the founding of the Linux Foundation, they will spearhead an effort around this. Without stronger brand recognition, there’s little incentive for Linux distributions to piggy-back on the name “Linux”.

The Linux Foundation certainly has its work cut out, but these are not insurmountable problems. We look forward to doing our part as an
interested ISV.

As an aside, on behalf of all of us at Hyperic, we would like to personally congratulate Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation and former head of the Free Standards Group. Jim and the founding members of Hyperic are all Covalent alums and have been friends personally and professionally for a long time. We are extremely happy to see him rewarded for all of his hard work at the FSG. Kudos to you, Jim!

Back in 2002 we designed HQ to be a platform that provides multiple management features (discovery, monitoring, etc.) implemented through a single web based portal, and with support for any technology. We spent the better part of 2 years working on maturing a platform which delivered on this promise and listening to our customers as they helped influence our direction. In July of 2006 we open sourced what was by then a very mature solution, and took what we considered to be the next logical step in the evolution of our product and our company. The process of open sourcing a product with over 700,000 lines of code is by no means trivial. Through that process we chose a license we believe benefits our community (GPL v2) and offered not just code but a ready to run, secure solution for managing whatever mix of applications, infrastructure, and hardware you threw at us. After all, we felt that the fact that our product was now open source should not imply that the solution is any less useable or easy to deply for the members of our community than for our enterprise customers. We’ve always maintained that “open source management != management of open source”

Now, with a new year ahead of us, we mark the next step in our development of the best solution for managing your IT infrastructure. HQ 3.0 brings with it a complete set of platform features which were previously unavailable in our open source offering. In particular, our event management feature which tracks logs and configuration, and our remote control feature which helps you take corrective action on your environment directly through the HQ portal. These two features are now part of the open source HQ platform because we believe that they are a crucial element to managing any type of environment. Additionally, HQ 3.0 introduces a whole new dynamic dashboard which allows you to build custom NOC views that automatically update themselves using AJAX/REST. Oh, and “one more thing”… 3.0 also introduces multi-level alert escalation, so you can design workflows that automatically escalate any alert to the right people in your team.

This combination of new features and updated performance and security fixes make HQ 3.0 the most complete, scaleable, and powerful open source management solution out there. We invite everyone to take the beta for a spin, file bugs, and give us feedback on how you like it.

-Javier