Open-source management arrives

Vendors address user pain points, integration, usability and support for open-source management applications.

Six open-source companies and project sponsors this week founded an industry organization to elevate the status of open-source management tools in enterprise IT shops.

The Open Management Consortium (OMC) says it will develop standards to simplify the job of integrating disparate open-source management applications in an effort to make managing large enterprise networks with open-source tools easier for users. Most companies use several management tools, but the majority of proprietary products available today require extensive integration for them to share data - even when they're from the same vendor. The OMC proposes its members develop common methods of collecting, sharing and reporting on management data collected across enterprise networks.

The group doesn't consider itself in competition with commercial vendors and, in fact, would like to see market leaders BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM contribute to the effort so buyers can more open source applications more easily with commercial products.

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Six open-source companies and project sponsors this week founded an industry organization to elevate the status of open-source management tools in enterprise IT shops.

The Open Management Consortium (OMC) says it will develop standards to simplify the job of integrating disparate open-source management applications in an effort to make managing large enterprise networks with open-source tools easier for users. Most companies use several management tools, but the majority of proprietary products available today require extensive integration for them to share data - even when they're from the same vendor. The OMC proposes its members develop common methods of collecting, sharing and reporting on management data collected across enterprise networks.

The group doesn't consider itself in competition with commercial vendors and, in fact, would like to see market leaders BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM contribute to the effort so buyers can more open source applications more easily with commercial products.

Vendors joining in

Vendors such as Centeris, GroundWork Open Source, Hyperic and Splunk have already started to open parts of their proprietary software code and make it available through open source licenses. They separately emerged in the past year and straddled the open source and proprietary worlds, offering management applications rooted in open source and in some cases, providing free versions for download. Management heavyweights such as IBM and CA have separately shown their support for open source as well. About a year ago IBM acquired open source developer Gluecode, and last fall CA spun out its Ingres database technology into an independent open source database company.

"The tide is starting to turn. There are more open source management products, and commercial vendors are getting more interested in exploring and integrating with open source, which can only benefit the end-user community," says Ethan Galstad, founder and president of Ayamon, an OMC member.

Galstad also created and remains the lead developer of Nagios, a 7-year-old open source network monitoring tool that has been the basis for commercial products from Hyperic. Galstad says the willingness of management vendors - albeit smaller start-ups - to open their source code shows the market is ready to adopt open source management.

"Open source tools have always been strong in IT departments and used by technical engineers, but it has not been until the past year that I have seen commercial vendors taking their proprietary tools and making them open source or providing parts of them under an open source license," Galstad says.

Such vendor interest in open source could spur adoption among hesitant IT managers concerned about the community behind the source code, industry watchers say.

"The OMC is a sort of reassurance to IT managers that there is a committed community behind open source systems management," says Raven Zachary, a senior analyst and head of the open source practice at The 451 Group. "The group has indicated it will work toward developing common APIs and a common integration layer, so IT managers won't have to worry about weaving disparate systems together on their own."