Open Source Weblog

...According to Soltero, it’s harder having your voice heard as an open source player in the US: “In the US I’d actually say this sector is a little ‘noisy’ – there are a lot of people in open source saying exactly the same thing and breaking away from that in a crowded technology market is difficult.”

But as for end users’ appetite for open source, he said: ““In Europe the open source trend is definitely gaining increased momentum. And the surprising thing is that in European geographies we find a bigger appetite amongst enterprises for participation in the open source community and specific open source projects.”

Soltero said that 37% of all the Hyperic community activity comes directly from Europe – a high percentage considering the size of the US market and the fact Hyperic is based in the US.

“There seems to be a clearer sense amongst folks in Europe using open source that you don’t get something for nothing,” Soltero continued, “that even if all they give back is feedback that can help other users, it’s important to contribute something. Sometimes in the US people will see open source as just a free product. That’s fine too, we have a free product for them, but it’s great when companies participate for the greater good.”

Hyperic meanwhile says it is complementary to the big four systems management companies (IBM Tivoli, CA, Compuware, and BMC) because they don't focus enough on web infrastructure management.

It recently launched Hyperic HQ 3.2, two new OEM partnerships with SpringSource and Iona, and a jointly developed management project with Red Hat, called RHQ.

The RHQ project is the result of an extension of the partnership between Red Hat and Hyperic first announced in November last year. The RHQ project aims to develop a common services management platform that will be used in future versions of each company's products. As the next major milestone in this effort, the RHQ project will serve as the code base for JBoss Operations Network v2.0 due out this spring.

Hyperic's open source web infrastructure management technology is aimed squarely at those in the enterprise responsible for the company's web infrastructure. It collates and analyzes information from all of the technologies that underpin web applications, including the likes of databases, application servers, web servers, and even virtualization technology where it has been deployed.

Information collated by Hyperic's software can also be exported to other business intelligence or systems management tools for further dissemination or analysis, but Soltero said that for now the company has no plans to expand the technology beyond managing the web infrastructure.

Hyperic has raised $10m in two VC rounds to date, one in 2006 and one in 2007. It has grown from five employees in 2005 to around 40 today. As well as offering a free download for those not needing all of the enterprise bells and whistles, there is a free evaluation version of the enterprise edition available from the company's web site.