Solar Winds

Is open source affiliation keeping upstart systems management tools out of the enterprise?

According to IT management blogger John M. Willis, upstart systems management vendors like Zenoss and Hyperic need to tone down their open source rhetoric and take a page from their competitors like Solar Winds and Nimsoft.

“Zenoss and Hyperic beachfront with open source too much and it keeps them out of the enterprise,” Willis said. “Stop it with the open source stuff. Stop even mentioning it. Solar Winds is kicking your butt all over the place and all they’re talking about is price and performance.”

Willis isn’t advocating that Zenoss and Hyperic drop open source altogether, rather make it a line item instead of a headline.

“Almost everybody I talk to in enterprise IT management isn’t keen on open source,” Willis said. “If there’s a team that wants to run Nagios, then they usually can get a checkmark on it if they don’t have anything already in place. But if you want to rip and replace Tivoli with Zenoss, management will say ‘Eh…. I’m not sure about that.’”

If a company is going the Nagios, Zenoss or Hyperic route, they’re going hook line and sinker, according to Solar Winds senior VP Kenny Van Zant. “They’ll suffer the manual cost of configuration and maintenance that open source will bring, because they don’t even have $5000 to spend,” Van Zant said. “Or people are open source fans who want to use open source wherever they can. When there is a gap on Zenoss, the fill it with nTop, Cacti, or some other open source product of the month and integrate them all together.

“We bump up against those free tools when the open source person leaves the company,” Van Zant said. “We replace Nagios deployments. It just takes too much to keep it up and running.”

Are you willing to bring open source systems management tools into your shop? Did your management team object? Email me or leave feedback in the comments.