Open Source Blog

“We have always been focused on the systems management space,” he said. “In July we open sourced it to get it in the hands of as many people as possible, he said of the Hyperic HQ management server.

The company has now released version 3.0 of the open source version with a new operations dashboard, alerting, event analysis and corrective control enhancements. According to Soltero, the key thing about 3.0 is that it is offers proactive management.

“The idea behind this release is as we continues to see a number of alternatives, we see a number of solutions that are very reactive in nature, and a re dumb, for want of a better term,” he said.

By that, Soltero explained, he was referring to simple red light/green light monitoring dashboards that take little account of application interdependencies. “Businesses are moving to fast moving applications, which escalates the problem of passive monitoring,” he explained.

“We take a series of management functionality: monitoring, auto discovery, event management, control and alerting, and implement them in a way that is independent of one application to another.”

According to Soltero, the approach is paying off as businesses increasingly adopt service oriented architecture and virtualization technologies that the existing systems management approaches are not capable of handling.

“It’s the next-generation data center. This is about managing a growing type of data center,” he said. From an open source perspective there isn’t an equivalent product out there.”

In a recent blog posting Soltero noted in which he talked up the fact that the difference between HQ and established proprietary vendors is not simply a matter of cost.

One of the differences enabled by the open source approach is that the company’s software gets in to the hands of IT administrators, rather than having to be sold by PowerPoint-wielding salesman to CIOs and IT directors.

“We operate on a very merit-based adoption cycle,” said Soltero. “It’s all about the person who’s closer to the problem. We’ve seen such a huge uptake in adoption because the value is well understood by the customer.”

Since the technology was open sourced in July 2006 Hyperic has added more than 200 businesses to its list of customers based on more than 35,000 downloads, he said.