Neil McAllister at InfoWorld: BEA, Open Source, and Enterprise Management

Neil McAllister, editor extraordinaire at InfoWorld, gives BEA a tongue-lashing (keyboard-lashing?) for recent statements by Rob Levy, BEA CTO. Although I have to admit, I don’t see what the story is here. Here is another traditional proprietary company suddenly realizing that it’s market is collapsing beneath them, and then they lash out at open source with the hope of undercutting it, but all they’re really doing is expressing a visceral fear of the open source quicksand. He seems to have missed all the other CxO’s that tried and failed to do this. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Neil was also nice enough to mention that Hyperic does a great job of managing Tomcat. I should also point out that Hyperic HQ can also manage BEA WebLogic. And that’s the general point that should be made here: all of these proprietary companies make a management console for their product. You can find one from Oracle, BEA, and tons of others. But how many of those A) play nice with integrated management systems? B) How many of them communicate via standardized protocols? And how many admins want to play around with 16 different consoles just so they can manage everything in their environment? (Answers: A. not many B. not many and C. none)

And this gets to the heart of the enterprise systems management dilemma: because there are a ton of enterprise products out there that don’t really know how to get along in a heterogeneous environment, there is a fundamental need for an open source management platform that can help admins integrate all of their IT software. And in 2006, all of the installed software in a given enterprise will consist of a healthy dose of open source stuff. So not only to sysadmins have to worry about managing proprietary, closed software, they now have to integrate all of the Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, and MySQL deployments. In order to bring all of this together in a single management interface, there’s just no other way to keep a handle on it all without using an open source management platform. The traditional management products (you know who they are) don’t do a good job of accounting for open source software, and they’re very inflexible. Hyperic HQ is the open source management platform that solves this riddle.

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