OpenNMS has always focused on making a great product versus pretty marketing stuff, and nothing is more evident of this than the OpenNMS “booth” presence.

We only go to conferences that invite us, and we’re still trying to figure out how to best do them. Usually we make sure that at least half the people in the booth are from the community at large and not The OpenNMS Group. Then we figure we need some sort of sign.

For the first show it was off to Kinkos and we got our logo on a vinyl sign. This is the original logo that is evident in this picture from LinuxWorld San Francisco 2005:

We thought this was pretty cool. It was the first time the OpenNMS logo had been rendered that large. But while I know what OpenNMS stands for, and you know what OpenNMS stands for, not many other people seemed to figure it out.

When we had our logo contest and voted on the new logo, we also needed a new sign. Here it is from SCaLE:

This, also a Kinkos special, is a slightly larger sign with both the logo and our tagline: Enterprise-grade Open Source Network Management.

Plus SCaLE was the first show we had booth babes. (grin)

Well, being the finely tuned marketing machine that is OpenNMS, we decided it was time for something a little more formal, so I present to you The Booth:

That’s brozow, me and ranger in our best gansta poses. Since ranger owns the only copy of Photoshop he is the default graphics artist, and he did an amazing job with the graphics on this thing.

Minus booth babes, this will premiere at LinuxWorld Expo in a couple of weeks, along with our new, yes new, 24-inch Mac monitor. We have arrived.

So think of OpenNMS as just another highly successful, commercially backed project with amazing marketing … just minus the millions in VC money.

(grin)