One of my favorite business books is Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. Perhaps it is time to order the follow up book, Inside the Tornado.

Lately, working at OpenNMS has been like holding on to the tail of a dragon. Moore uses the tornado analogy, but I think I understand now what he means. Since last fall we’ve added five people, and each time we add more resources, we end up with more business and more work. It’s crazy. It’s fun.

It’s a little scary.

But what really excites me is that we are finally getting some traction in positioning OpenNMS as a replacement for tools such as OpenView and Tivoli. Our guy in the UK, Dr. Craig Gallen, gave a presentation today in Dubai on the work we’ve done with the TeleManagement Forum to bring open source development and ideals to the world’s largest telecommunication companies and vendors, so it was appropriate that today we also found out that we have been nominated for the TMForum Excellence Awards in the Leadership category.

The award will go to “the member company demonstrating leadership, dedication and commitment to the Forum’s industry collaboration activities, and overall progress in the industry” and while I hope we win, just being nominated is a win for open source.

If any of my three readers will be in Nice at the TMForum conference this May, be sure to let me know.