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I came across a blog post by Murat Aksu, VP of Marketing at Zenoss, recently entitled “Not your father’s Open Source Software.” It got me thinking that the open source software (OSS) market moves at lighting speed in the same way we all think that OSS development moves. From a user-expectation/market-dynamics point of view, what used to take years takes only months. So I gave Murat a call to learn more about his thoughts on the changes in the industry. He doesn't bring my grey hair/no hair to the subject but he has had an experience mix that lets him analyze the trends from multiple perspectives.

Murat is saying we are already into a second (or third) generation of OSS organization type and I think he is right. In the area of the market where Zenoss (pronounced Zen-os) competes, he compares his company and Hyperic—truly OSS systems management companies (VC backed in Hyperic’s case)—as part of a generation ahead of organizations such as Nagios, more of a pure systems management software community that simply points users to support options. An analogy more to the point for me, a midstack software guy, is the difference between Apache and JBoss (before it was acquired by Red Hat).

Murat joined Zenoss in April of this year from Mercury Interactive, which had been acquired by HP in November 2006. So he brings a sense of the difference between the closed source and open source business models as well. He finds two countervailing trends:

-- On one hand, he says, “most people who work in proprietary software companies in Silicon Valley either underestimate or simply don’t understand OSS.” Execs get it, he thinks but developers and middle managers don’t see OSS as a threat and are not even making an effort to learn about OSS.

-- On the other hand, he implies that the difference between OSS organizational generations described above is more meaningful than the difference between closed source and second-generation OSS companies. He does not think that Zenoss competes with Nagios but with BMC, CA, HP/Mercury and IBM. Like these big four systems management software suppliers, Zenoss has to supply a full suite of monitoring tools to compete.

That’s why OSS development has to move ahead at lightning speed. It’s not just for “two guys in Alabama working out of their garage” any more. “Good software ideas regardless of their licensing mechanism find users, supporters, customers and financiers” quickly.

Another key differentiator, which we discussed when we talked to the LoopFuse founders last month, is that Zenoss provides a complete suite of software and services to help users succeed in monitoring their entire IT infrastructure, not just their OSS infrastructure. Zenoss started with a Core offering that Enterprise Open Source Magazine readers this summer selected as the Best Linux Systems Management Tool, not just the best OSS Linux systems management tool.

Also this summer Zenoss added an Enterprise Edition that combines the Core edition with time-saving features, support services, best practices, and indemnification.

The Core edition is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Business Issue |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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