Welcome to 2016. My year started out with an invitation to join the AARP. (sigh)

As my three readers know, when it comes to this business of open source we are pretty much making things up as we go along. We are lead by our business plan of “spend less money than you earn” and our mission statement of “help customers, have fun, make money” but the rest is pretty fluid.

In 2013 we mixed things up and tried a more “traditional” start up path by seeking out investment and spending more money than we had. It didn’t work out so well.

Thus 2014 was more of a rebuilding year as we tried to move the focus back to our roots. It paid off, as 2015 was a very good year. We had record gross revenues, and although we didn’t make much money on the bottom line, it was positive once again. At the moment we are still investing in the company and the project so pretty much every extra dollar goes into growth.

And we had a lot of growth. The decision to split OpenNMS into Meridian and Horizon paid off in three major Horizon releases. Horizon 17 was an especially large and important release as it brought in the Newts integration. At the moment we are working with it on a customer site using a ScyllaDB cluster capable of supporting 75K inserts per second. The technologies introduced in 2015 will make it in to Meridian 2016, due in the spring, and it should solidify OpenNMS as a platform that can really scale.

In 2015 we also received orders from two of the Fortune 5 companies. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which two and you have a 1 in 16 shot at getting it right (grin). The fact that companies that can choose, literally, any technology they want yet they choose OpenNMS speaks volumes.

One of these days we’re going to have to figure out a way to talk about our customers by name, since they are all so cool. We are working on it, but it is surprisingly difficult to get permission to publicly post that information. Above all we respect our clients’ privacy.

I have high expectations for 2016 and the power of the Open Source Way. Thanks to everyone who has supported us over the last decade and more, and we just hope you find our efforts provide some value.

Happy New Year.