A couple of weeks ago I had breakfast with some venture capitalists. One of them was joking about how a lot of start-up companies tend to constantly change their marketing message to fit in with the fashions of the day while the underlying product is basically the same, and that sort of stuck in my head.

I decided it would be fun to track the taglines of a venture-backed commercial software company in the same space as OpenNMS. This is what I found:

• 2006 Sep: Enterprise Monitoring (minus the cost and hassle)
• 2006 Nov: Open Source Enterprise Monitoring
• 2007 Jun: IT Monitoring & Management powered by Open Source
• 2007 Jun: Open Source Network & Systems Monitoring
• 2007 Jul: Open Source Network Monitoring and Systems Management
• 2007 Aug: Open Source Network & Systems Monitoring
• 2007 Sep: Open Source Application, Server and Network Management
• 2008 Jul: Commercial Open Source Network, Systems and Application Monitoring
• 2008 Oct: Commercial Open Source Application, Systems and Network Monitoring
• 2009 Oct: Commercial Open Source Monitoring and Systems Management Software
• 2010 Jan: Open Enterprise Management
• 2011 Mar: The Cloud Management Company
• 2012 Jan: Transforming IT Operations