Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - groundwork

Systems management, what will happen when the VCs want their money ?

Kris Buytaert — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:12:41 +0000

Tarus is happy not to have VC's on his back. He doesn't want to be responsible for turning a 15 Milj investment into a 150 Milj cashout. Others chose to go that way.

Back when he wrote the article the chances were small that he already knew that Qlusters was going to be shut down with still sooo much money in the bank, but the VC's wanted it back.

So how do open source companies plan on making those tenfold roi reality.
Apart from selling out to a bigger company I think thats a very difficult task.
Especially when you keep in mind how to manage both the Open Source community and your customers. The figures he mentions that VC's require surely start pushing vendors into violating Fabrizio Capobianco rules.

Now the story changes when indeed you cn go to a model where you are selling a large scalable service to your customers, even with microsized payments it becomes a possibility, but that's a totally different business model from what e.g. the Open source systems management shops are doing .

So will the Zenoss, Hyperics or the Groundworks of this world survive the demands of their VC

Luckily these projects are Open Source, so when the company dissapears, the project can continue, and grow even better. Like openQRM did

GroundWork heading the same path as Qlusters ?

Kris Buytaert — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:55:44 +0000

In this article the ScienceLogic blogs wonders.

Here’s an interview with David Lily, founder and CEO. Hmm. What happened to CEO Ranga Rangachari? As far as I can tell, he disappeared somewhere between Nov 2007 and Jan 2008. No announcement that I could find… Wonder how things are going for GroundWork? Are they about to follow QLusters and drop the “Open Source” part of their name that they tacked on a couple years back?

Then followed up with the article on Qlusters closing shop where they identify different reasons for an Open Source systems management shop to close

What are the signs that a systems management company is going out of business?

a) they abandon their open source project, which was supposedly tied to their commercially supported version

b) they switch CEOs very very quietly

c) they are an “open source” company trying to actually make money (via paying customers, not VC)

d) all of the above

I've read rumours about GroundWorks management leaving before, but are they really heading the same direction ?

Now while we are on the crazy similarities subject ...

Remember Caldera ? Who bought SCO, after which it rebranded to SCO ?
Didn't have a nice ending didn't it ? So can you come up with another example of such a TakeOver and Rebrand scenario ?

Groundwork should be afraid

Kris Buytaert — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:57:26 +0000

It seems that Groundworks is afraid
of John. And with reason. I looked into their product and hmm.. well.. I`m not gonna use the words John used.

But given the fact that hey manage to break a working apache setup during their installation, fail to create a working installer and create RPMs that require environment variables to be set before you can install them ..

Well my expectations were lowered drastically. Oh and when you register at their site.. expect to be bothered by supportive sales people. Multiple times :(

Most people are talking about Hyperic, Zenoss , openNMS, Nagios and Groundwork, weird that Zabbix is almost never in that list .. yet