The 451 Group: Open Source is shaking it up

The 451 Group just released a report, Managing in the Open: The Next Wave of Systems Management, which focuses on how the big 4 management vendors are ripe for a shake-up. This is not all that surprising to me, as Hyperic has based its business plan on the opportunity in this market and it is the reason for our continued success.

One quote got me thinking though:

“Open source is breathing new competitive life into systems management, ultimately forcing the established vendors to respond in their products, pricing and strategies. Open source could give potential challengers the cost and ease-of-implementation advantages they need to take on such formidable opponents.” said Raven Zachary, the Open Source Research Director at The 451 Group.

3 comments July 31st, 2007 javier

Hyperic Releases Alfresco Plugin

Released today, administrators of the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management System now have access to a fully supported, enterprise-ready systems management solution with Hyperic HQ for Alfresco. The new Hyperic HQ plugin instantly enables HQ and Alfresco administrators to take full advantage of Hyperic’s powerful management capabilities, including auto-discovery, monitoring, complex alerting and remediation. With today’s release of the Hyperic HQ for Alfresco plugin, Hyperic HQ becomes the only monitoring system to natively support Alfresco deployments on every platform and architecture.

Add comment July 31st, 2007 Hyperic Press Desk

Happy National Sys Admin Appreciation Day!

Its that time of year again. Yes, a very SAAD day, indeed. That is, Sys Admin Appreciation Day!

On this day, I encourage all you “users” out there to follow 10 simple rules to really show your appreciation:

1. Remember your password
2. Fix your printer yourself.
3. If you get the message “Critical System Updates Available”, don’t ignore it. Take the updates.
4. Don’t get your laptop stolen.
5. Use sudo, not root
6. If it was working yesterday, something changed. Fess up
7. Check to make sure its plugged in
8. RTFM
9. Don’t open that .exe your nice new stranger friend sent you.
10. If its 4:55 pm, let it go. It can wait until Monday.

10 comments July 27th, 2007 javier

Hyperic is where the action is

This has been quite possibly one of the most exciting days to work at Hyperic. And by that, I mean 609 Mission Street, on the corner of 2nd Street in San Francisco, not necessarily the company. Its such a surreal day, I just have to share.

The day starts off with an apparent dead guy on a gurney in the street for 2 hours, being casually watched by a security guard with passersby actually taking phone camera photos like tourists.

4 comments July 24th, 2007 javier

OSCON 2007

The Open Source Convention is always an entertaining mix of the old guard and those new to open source. I look forward to crashing quite a few talks this year and mixing it up a bit. If you happen to be there, feel free to drop me a line at johnmark _at_ hyperic.com.

And it appears I’ll get to drop in on the last day of Ubuntu Live as well - good things.

Add comment July 23rd, 2007 John Mark

Javier Soltero Interview with Redmonk

Redmonk’s Michael Cote got around to posting this interview of Javier from JavaOne. The wait was worth it - the audio is far better than the one I posted of the same interview.

Coté and James talked with Javier about SIGAR, Hyperic’s open source library for getting low-level system information, the perennial question of single- vs. multi-source open source development and what it means to be an open source company, comparisons to Wily as far as trouble-shooting, and finally the Java middle-ware landscape that Hyperic finds in its customer base.

Watch the full video.

1 comment July 23rd, 2007 John Mark

A different kind of Enterprise

I’ve always liked the word “enterprise”… even before I got into the software business. Star Trek references aside, the translation for the word enterprise in Spanish (my native language) is “empresa” which is just another word for “company”. Somehow in English, and especially in technology, the term Enterprise has always implied some larger, more complex type of company. In fact, the terms “SMB” and “Enterprise” seem to be mutually exclusive. It’s amusing to see traditional Enterprise vendors such as SAP go to great lengths to court the mid-size and smaller business segments with their otherwise Enterprise-wares. It’s examples like this that in my view perpetuate that artificial rift between technology meant for big business and technology made for smaller ones. It’s not about the size of the opportunity; it’s about the type of problem you’re trying to solve.

3 comments July 23rd, 2007 javier

The Best Decision We Ever Made

Today marks the one year anniversary of the release of Hyperic HQ under the GPL. It’s quite an amazing thing to look back on everything that has happened to our product and our team since we went through that process last year. From the discussions we had about wanting to make sure the code was in a state we were proud to show the world, to the process of explaining the importance of this new step to our customers and partners.

2 comments July 17th, 2007 javier

You know you have a community when…

One of the best parts about my job is seeing the HQ footprint increase on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s just the little things that make me happy. Like this job description for a unix system administrator.

It reads like your usual sysadmin job description, until you get to this part:

Restructuring the shared hosting network so that they fit in with the new network server. This may include a redesign of our LAN IP allocations. Extensive configuration of Hyperic HQ so that it monitors all the applications. Investigation into using the APC Power MIB to monitor the UPS’s and PDU’s.

Add comment July 12th, 2007 John Mark

Stay Alert!

IT Administrators have a love and hate relationship with alerts. They don’t want to miss any important outages or performance problems, because their jobs depend on it. However, those issues have a tendency to surface at 2am in the morning. Hyperic HQ may collect vast amounts of monitoring data from the IT infrastructure, but the most important function that it provides is timely alerts.

We commissioned a user experience study a couple of months ago, and one of our focus group contestants summed it up best, “Alerts are very important and indispensable.” We always understood the importance of alerting, but by better understanding how Hyperic HQ participates in the problem resolution process, we were able to identify some important new features and directions for alerting in the upcoming Hyperic HQ 3.1 release.

1 comment July 12th, 2007 Charles Lee