September Newsletter – HQ 3.1 Enterprise & JasperSoft Partnership

It’s been a big month here at Hyperic. We left off last month shipping the GA version of Hyperic HQ 3.1, and now today, we have just shipped our shiny new version of Hyperic HQ 3.1 Enterprise.  Releases are always a major event for a company, but this release also marked an important milestone in our new partnership with JasperSoft, the maker of the software powering our new Enterprise Reports. We’ve also had a busy community, with Dan Gorman from hi5 winning the Plugin of the Month award and showing off his productivity on our website.

Hyperic HQ 3.1 Enterprise GA

The latest Hyperic HQ Enterprise release is now available! This latest release contains several improvements for the enterprise customer, including a brand new reporting engine, the alert center, lower CPU load, better database throughput, and much more.

• Report Center - One of the biggest net-new additions to the Hyperic HQ Enterprise, IT operators now have access to pre-built reports, making it easier for them to gain insight into IT performance and communicate recommendations between IT and upper management based on analysis. Initial report topics include: Alert Summary, Alert Detail, Availability Downtime, Disk Usage and New Inventory reports. Look for more reports to be added later.
• Alert Center - The Alert Center usability has been improved, adding advanced filters for Hyperic HQ Enterprise admins to filter the latest alerts based on group, severity and type.
• Follow the Sun Alerting – Roles now support a time of day and availability feature which makes assignment of alerts to on call staff a breeze in Hyperic HQ 3.1 Enterprise.
• Performance Increases - This latest release features significant performance improvements for all users. Beta customers noticed a remarkable reduction in CPU usage for HQ Server, and database throughput can now be pushed 3x more than previous benchmarks.

Hyperic HQ Enterprise has always given customers the tools to be an IT hero, from comprehensive metrics gathering for more efficient resource allocation and root cause analysis to industry-leading usability and faster time-to-deployment. With this release, IT admins have more super powers at their disposal than ever with a more scalable and robust HQ.

The Enterprise Advantage: New Demo, New Evaluation Program

We know our open source software rocks. Our community knows it too. In fact, IT shops operating at scale frequently dismiss our Enterprise Subscription because they are perfectly happy using Open Source Software. What they miss is the opportunity to see how the Enterprise features can save time and money by deploying Hyperic HQ Enterprise. Sure, it is a paid-for annual subscription – but ROI is generally in weeks with saved headcount and avoided problems.

JasperSoft Partnership Announced

Hyperic Reports is a major new feature in the latest Hyperic HQ 3.1 Enterprise release, and it is also a major milestone in a just announced partnership between Hyperic and JasperSoft, the producer of the JasperStudio graphical report designer and JasperReports java library used to power the new Hyperic Enterprise Reporting features.

“The ability to drill into the data and generate reports is critical to IT management, especially in web-driven markets in which every minute of downtime has significant business implications,” said Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic. “We’re excited to be integrating technology from a fellow open source provider—we share a singular focus on adding the most value to our customers, and as a result were able to move much more quickly to bring our integrated offering to market.”

Announcing HyperCAST Webinar Series

The Hyperic community is growing by leaps and bounds, and so is the community curiosity on how to best extend their Hyperic deployments! So, we created the HyperCAST series of webinars designed to give you up-close and personal information on Hyperic HQ, from the latest features in HQ 3.1 to best practices with Hyperic HQ. Each session will feature 30 minutes of instruction from a Hyperic expert followed by an interactive, live Q & A session. Check the Hyperic upcoming HyperCASTs on Hyperic.com:

• What’s new in HQ 3.1 – Oct 9, 2007 11am PDT / 6pm GMT  by Javier Soltero, CEO, Hyperic
• Hyperic HQ: Full Throttle – Oct 23, 2007 11am PDT / 6pm GMT  by John Mark Walker
• Scaling Infrastructure for HQ – Nov 6, 2007 11am PST / 7pm GMT by Chip Witt / Alex Ma

Plugin of the Month Award

Every month, we highlight the best community contribution with the Plugin of the Month award. This month’s award goes to Dan Gorman for his NetApp plugin, which he wrote for hi5′s operations center. Dan will receive a $250 American Express gift certificate for his efforts. Way to go, Dan!

To enter your plugins for consideration in next month’s award, simply create your own plugin page on the new HyperFORGE, Hyperic’s new collaboration web site, and our engineers will review it. If we think it’s good, and it’s better than the rest, we’ll send you the gift certificate.

Who is that on Hyperic.com?

We’ve updated our website in conjunction with the new release of Hyperic HQ 3.1 Enterprise. With it, we’ve had a little fun with some of our models on the main page. The first model is pretty simple – a running version of Hyperic HQ Enterprise – actually the one that runs our data center!

The second model in a graphic titled “Spider-Dan”, Dan Gorman, Senior Systems Engineer at hi5 Networks showed us how much more he gets done using Hyperic HQ Enterprise. We were really excited to have Dan pose for us as he is also our Plugin of the Month winner and longtime customer of Hyperic. To read more about Dan’s usage of Hyperic.

Finally, our own Tom Keeney showed his superpowers in the graphic titled “Superman”. Tom’s powers are probably best noticed as he improved performance of the HQ Server with a single bound this past release. Tom came to us early this summer from a previous role as a super-power at Wily. Tom’s efforts here as a Senior Software Engineer are bound to be noticed by many! All these graphics rotate randomly on the website’s main page.

The Latest on Javier’s Blog

Javier continues to keep an eye on IT Management and Open Source Software activity. First on the list is the rising trend of system outages, including Skype’s recent debacle last month. The trend of online services companies and outages is disturbing. Perhaps its because these companies are using the wrong software for the job – Javier thinks they should give him a call!

One of the largest acquisitions in Open Source history occured last month when Citrix purchased XenSource, one of our sister investment companies. Some took the time to predict this as the beginning of the end for Open Source software, and Javier took some time to set the record straight. Acquisition will happen, but mostly because Open Source is such a hotbed of innovation.

A final highlight of Javier’s blog explains what we mean by Hyperic HQ 3.1 BRE release. (Hint: BRE stands for Best Release Ever!)

Hyperic in the News

A year ago, Network World highlighted Hyperic as one of the top 10 Open Source Companies to watch. While they only dish  out this award once per company – they did run a roundup article updating readers what the top open source companies of last year are doing now.

Following this article, InfoWorld curiously posted their annual BOSSie awards, Best in Open Source, but decided that the area of enterprise monitoring was undecided.

Hyperic is listed as one of the top contenders that are putting the legacy Big 4 “on notice”. Reportedly, InfoWorld will be doing a follow-on software review to finally decide a winner here.

Finally, our own Doug MacEachern, Hyperic CTO, spent some time writing in Virtualization Strategy Magazine how IT shops should best prepare for managing in a virtualized environment.

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