I had the opportunity to sit down with Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic last month in San Francisco at the OSBC. We had a great discussion, which I opened bluntly by saying, “You don’t need to tell me about your software; I’ve seen it, my lab team thinks it’s cool, and we’re impressed.” He was happy to hear it but probably not surprised.
One of the obvious pros of the open source model (like the freeware model of the 90’s) is that you can get what you want without calling anyone or firing off a “please contact me” request to the company’s sales department. Another equally obvious pro is that prospective customers can really walk through the product’s architecture and actual implementation to make sure that the marketing promises (“marketechture”) actually line up with the product being described.
Kishi Malhotra and Stephen Zarkos – the OSSL’s experts on manageability – did a comprehensive teardown of Hyperic and a range of other open source management technologies (such as Nagios and OpenPegasus), which they’ll be posting in the next few days. What they found about Hyperic is that it does a great job of making a low-footprint, easily adaptable management technology and is commercializing it in an open source model. We thought that SIGAR, their agent API, was particularly clever.
Javier and Doug MacEachern (their CTO, and a maintainer for mod_perl among other achievements) spent some time on a podcast with me last week – if you’re interested in hearing their reasons for building Hyperic, how it compares to Nagios, and what they learned in taking their product open source, listen in. They’ll be available to answer questions on this post as well – leave a comment if you’re curious about something they’re doing.
Also, drop us a note and let us know if you interested in more interviews with open source and interoperability technology leaders on Port 25.