Something has been kind of nagging at me lately. Why it is that in the IT world, the task of “support” is held in such low esteem?

You know what I’m talking about. I spend time with a lot of organizations, and rarely do I see support people treated the same way as, say, developers. In fact, support people tend to be the most overworked and the least appreciated technical people in most companies, and I’m not sure why.

Of course, I have some ideas.

Prior to open source, software support was a cost center. The company made money on selling software licenses and to a large extent support contracts, but the best they could hope for was that the clients would buy the software and never use it. When they actually had to provide the support they sold, it would eat away at the bottom line.

With the rise in services-based business models, services and support can represent the majority of a company’s revenue. But even in those companies it is rare that a top support person will be paid as much or have as much chance for advancement as a top coder.

The OpenNMS Group makes most of its money through support, and everyone in the company can be considered part of the support team. We’re small enough that each and every support ticket is sent to the whole company. As we are growing, I’m trying to find people who get into support as much as I do, and it’s hard.

I love support. Well, to be honest, I love support most days. It’s a huge challenge, and I think its fun to try and figure out why systems aren’t behaving the way they should. Is it a bug? A misconfiguration? A problem with the operating system? Loose nut on the keyboard?

My first real support job was with a division of Harris called Harris Digital Telephone Systems (HDTS – no longer around). When you joined up, they put you through several weeks of support training. I really took to their product, so the veterans who were training me took special joy in trying to make the classes challenging. At one point we had to configure a telephone switch, and then they would go in and muck with it. We had to correct the problems they introduced. But for me they added a twist: I had to do it over the phone from the next room.

It’s one thing to be able to fix a problem on a system you have direct access to, but it is a lot harder to figure it out strictly from what the person is telling you on the phone. This is one reason we got a WebEx account to enable an easy way to get connected to a client’s OpenNMS install. The hardest thing to deal with is a client who knows just enough to be dangerous. In my years of support I have learned that there are times with the client will lie to you. They don’t do it maliciously, but they know enough to make some assumptions that aren’t always safe. To many it can be frustrating, but to me it just adds to the challenge.

Yes, I’m weird. But as I go looking to hire some more people for support roles I’m finding that it is hard to find someone who feels the same way as I do about the job. I have had a number of people approach me about a position as a developer. I need to hire one of those in the next couple of months, but to be honest we have a pretty solid development community as it is. I’ve had a couple of people who want to come on and do “business development”. While we could do a better job at sales, quite frankly we have about as much on our plate at the moment as we can handle.

So why am I not overwhelmed with people wanting support jobs?

1) Support is Hard

Not to knock developers, but writing code is much less stressful than handling support. There are pressures to be sure, but the number of unknown variables to be managed in a coding project is less than those in the average support issue. I constantly face support issues that could be due to configuration issues, the customer’s network, the server, the operating system, or bugs. Last week alone I dealt with one client who was having issues because they used Solaris tar versus GNU tar on a build (Solaris tar tends to truncate long file names) and another client who had bad memory in the server (which resulted in a number of crazy symptoms). Those aren’t easy to catch.

Add to that the fact that you are interacting directly with the client, and there is a lot of pressure to perform.

2) Support Gets No Respect

Before you jump on me for this one, think of all of the stereotypes of bad support. The overseas help desk. The recent story about Apple Geniuses not being able to figure out that the ringer on an iPhone was turned off. Everyone who has owned a computer can provide at least one support horror story, or they haven’t really used a computer.

Part of the reason is that employers don’t treat the support role the way they should. They think that grabbing someone off the street and sending them to a class is sufficient. I was talking with the CEO of a small software company a few months ago, and I asked him about his support team, and he pointed to the two interns in the corner. This is a guy who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his developers, but thought nothing of hiring the cheapest labor out there for support.

One sign of respect in this business is salary, and support positions tend to pay the least in a number of IT fields. Many people only accept the job in order to get their foot in the door to move up to a consulting or coding position, which brings me to …

3) No Advancement

How does one advance within a support organization, yet still do support? There’s always management, I guess. Within development you can always aspire to increase your responsibilities for given projects, but within support the only real upward movement is from first level to second, and from second to third.

In thinking about it, this isn’t really a fair observation. When I was at Northern Telecom there were about 13 “Salary Bands” yet it was extremely hard to get above a Band 7 unless you wanted to manage people. But I still think that there is more room for growth in areas such as programming versus support.

I don’t have any answers to these problems, but I’m working on ’em. The first step is to find a core group of people who really get into support, and then to refine the process for taking inexperienced yet motivated people and turning them into support gurus. I can see the ads now: It’s Like Sudoku on Steriods!

Second is to pay good support people well.

As far as advancement is concerned, I like to take support folks and make sure they do some on-site consulting with clients as well. It is real important to get face time with the people using your product, as well as to step back from the ticket queue and focus on one client and their problems for a change. Plus we get to travel to some neat places and work on some of the world’s coolest networks.

But none of this works without respect. At OpenNMS the support role is held in the highest regard, but I am as guilty as the next person when using the support services of other vendors. I’m going to make a point of giving some “props” to the next good support person I deal with. They deserve it.

People often ask me, “Tarus, even though you are over 40, how do you keep looking so darn good?” The answer is a steady diet of fine fermented beverages, usually involving hops, barley, malt and pure water. In fact, about once a year I take a trip to England (which in the Saxon tongue means “Land where everything costs double”) simply for health reasons, and since beer is the only thing affordable over there I pretty much live on a liquid diet (again, it’s for health reasons).

Recently, the Carolina Brewery opened its second location in my small town. A harbinger of development to come, it is at least locally owned. I was looking for an excuse to visit when I found out that John Willis was going to be in nearby Durham, NC.

Me and John hoisting pints of Copperline Amber Ale

I first met John at this year’s OSCON, and again at LinuxWorld. John reminds me a lot of Doug Stevenson. Doug has forgotten more about network management then I will ever know, and back in the OVForum days he was pretty much the “Elvis” of the OpenView world. John seems to be his opposite number on the Tivoli side of things.

Having worked in the network management world for a number of years on the proprietary side of things, John is getting real excited about the benefits of open source solutions. It was fun chatting with someone who obviously knows his stuff and sees the potential of what we are doing. Whether they admit it or not, the so called Big Four have stagnant product lines that are slow to react to changes in the market, and since they have been reliant on professional services for so long it isn’t too much of a stretch for those consultants now using their solutions to find it faster and easier to use open source.

John wants to get the Enterprise Systems Management (ESM) world together to address some of these issues, and he really wants me to come to BarCampESM. I am a big fan of the BarCamp format (I missed this year’s BarCampRDU ’cause I was on the road), but I am not certain that it will provide the format he is looking for. But it is in Austin (I’ll be in San Antonio next week) which I like, and I think I’ll have to show up to keep just to keep everyone honest (grin).

whurley, one of the organizers, now works for BMC (one of the Big Four) and I have my own little history with PATROL and the Boole and Babbage stuff, so while I like him I still have to remain skeptical of the motivations of BMC. There has been a lot of talk lately of successful open source projects being acquired by commercial companies (forgive me for not being able to find a relevant link, it seems they have slipped out of my RSS reader). One has to wonder if it is because these commercial companies have had a change of heart or if they just want to get a handle on, and perhaps stifle, projects that threaten their bottom line. But I like whurley, as does Ethan Galstad, and so I’ll probably go with my gut and at least listen to what he has to say. Plus it looks like Coté will be there, and I want to meet him in person.

Oh, speaking of Ethan Galstad, check out this Splunk ad that came across the screen when I was working on Sourceforge. Studly. Too bad he’s too skinny. Perhaps he can join me on a trip to England.

For health reasons, of course.

The Future

Occasionally OpenNMS gets mentioned alongside well funded “open source” management companies. Since we haven’t announced any multi-million dollar investment, the press often ignores us. But I much prefer it when we get mentioned favorably in the company of HP and IBM. That’s where I want to see the community take OpenNMS.

So, how do we get there?

First off, it takes time. You can try, but you can’t “buy” a community. We’ve worked very hard to build the OpenNMS community over the last seven plus years. We’ve done it by focusing on two things: OpenNMS will always be free, and OpenNMS will never suck. By trying to keep the .org and .com sides separate, we hope that those people active in the community will never fear that we would take their work and commercialize it. I like saying that you can’t stick nine pregnant women in a room for a month and get a baby. Some things take as long as they take, and no amount of money can speed that up.

It has taken OpenNMS over seven years to get where it is today, and I believe that some investment at this time would go a long way toward making the product stronger. Not $24 million, $10 million or even $4 million, but something more along the lines of $2 million.

Why “just” $2 million? Two main reasons: I don’t think the market is ready to support a large open source management company, and OpenNMS is not ready to spend more than that.

Since I like to explain things, let me ‘splain.

When a company takes in venture capital, the VCs don’t want it to sit around in the bank. They have banks, nice banks, that could take better care of their money than most start-ups. They want it spent, and they want a return of 5 to 10 times their investment in about 5 years. Thus a company that raises $20 million has only a couple of years to become worth well over $100 million dollars. That’s a mighty big challenge, and my guess is the temptation to raise that money on the backs of their customers will become really strong. How would they do that if it is open source? If it was truly open source, they couldn’t, but by using a software subscription licensing model they can lock the customer in, just like HP tries to do with OpenView.

I really don’t think any of the open source options out there, including OpenNMS, can both be true to open source and become worth that much in a couple of years. It is a totally new concept for many enterprises to not be forced to pay money for software. Current commercial OpenNMS clients are obviously ahead of the curve (they are quite the smart bunch, and good-looking, too). Many companies don’t believe that they can get something equivalent to much of what OpenView and Tivoli provide for considerably less money, or that software developed by a consortium can work better than one developed in a monolithic organization. It will take time, I think a couple of years, before it will be possible to really bring something like OpenNMS to the mainstream. Everyone is looking for the “catch”, the “gotcha” and the prevalence of “open source” as a marketing term isn’t helping.

Even if OpenNMS was able to raise many millions of dollars, I don’t think what we’ve started can be rushed, and thus I don’t think i could spend it wisely. I am so blessed to be able to work with the folks I work with in the OpenNMS community that I won’t do anything to jeopardize it, even if it means short term financial benefit for myself.

So what would I do with $2 million? I call it my $2M/2 year plan. Over the next two years I would use that money to focus on the real intellectual property of the OpenNMS Group: our knowledge of network management. We make a little money each year, and thus we have a good idea of what it takes to run a services business. OpenNMS could definitely use some polish, in terms of documentation and ease of use/installation, that an infusion of cash would enable. Plus the biggest comment I get when talking about OpenNMS is that few people have heard of us. I’d like to be able to market ourselves a little better. It’s a great testament to the product that we’ve been able to survive solely on word of mouth advertising.

Now, the biggest criticism of a services company is that you have to find and hire an army of people to provide those services. Aye, there’s the rub, eh? At OpenNMS we will get around that in a number of ways.

The last two people I’ve hired have been taken directly from the Order of the Green Polo (OGP). The OGP is the core team behind OpenNMS. Imagine hiring someone and having them be productive days before they even start their job. The people in the OGP are in it because they love OpenNMS, and you can’t find better. I’d like to hire them all.

So what happens when they run out? The “top secret” success of the OpenNMS Group is that we’ve learned how to use a core group of dedicated people to inspire others, and we have formalized a process where you can take a motivated person and quickly turn them into someone who can help others with the product and maintain a “laser-like” focus on the customer. They might not know everything in the beginning, but they will be helpful and, better still, they will know where to go for the “everything”.

Identifying and training people like that is hard, but we’ve learned both through experience and through services clients of ours like Rackspace that it is possible.

One final criticism of services companies is that the people are always on the road. The answer to that is simple: we won’t be doing the traveling. We are working though the community to find partners around the country and around the world to deliver on services related to OpenNMS. The OpenNMS Group will focus on support (which can scale), custom development (which drives new features) and training, while our partners, who already have great relationships with their own clients, can have the services revenue associated with deploying and customizing OpenNMS. It’s worked well in Italy, and we have plans underway for partners in the UK, the rest of Europe, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Since we don’t want to “own it all” we can make this happen, and use certification to insure a high level of quality.

I think getting all of the kinks out of this will take 2 years. Even if I had more money, I don’t think it can be done any faster. But I am certain by the end of those 2 years OpenNMS will be poised to become a real contender for replacing OpenView, and at that time we will have a story for the VCs that will make sense.

Now the only trick is to find an angel with $2 million to invest willing to wait 2 years. Answers on a postcard please …

It’s now about 3 hours since I started writing this, although with about a hundred edits, so I just want to sum up and go to bed. The future of software is in services, be it direct “I pay a person to do stuff for me” or software “as a service”, like Salesforce.com. Services are key to the success of open source projects. If it weren’t for services we’d have never discovered the market need for such things as an integration between CentricCRM and OpenNMS, much less gotten it done in less than a month.

Hybrid business models such as the “shareware” model or the “OpenView” model are short lived at best. Being totally free, products like OpenNMS will own the bottom, constantly driving software licensing revenue down and without a strong service model there is no way to make up for that loss. Finally, those companies that focus on service as the product, and can successfully scale it while maintaining a high quality of customer experience, will ultimately prevail.

I’ve bet the farm on it.

The Present

I’ve talked in the past about a number of “open source” business models. There’s the MySQL “dual license” model, where all the software is available under an open license but a proprietary license can be purchased. There’s what I call the “shareware” model where some software is offered under an open license and the rest is proprietary, and then there’s the “parasite” model where companies try to build a business by exploiting the work of other open source projects. I am sure there are many more, and I’d like to add one called the “OpenView” model. This is where a company wants to use the term “open source” to create a community like the OVForum, but keep a portion of the software closed so they can reap licensing revenue.

The current darlings of open source seem to be those who have managed to sell investors on an open source business model based on license revenue. They scoff at services businesses. One recently stated that in order to be successful, an open source company couldn’t have more than (approximately) 25% of its revenue from services.

So, what’s wrong with the statement that an open source company cannot be successful unless 25% (or less) of their business is services? Well, if I’m doing the math right, that means 75% (or more) of their revenue must come from something other than services, and that can only be software licenses.

The power of open source ultimately comes from the community. The community will work together to build something wonderful, and almost by definition for that to be successful the community must own the final product. If the product is actually owned by a specific entity, for the purposes of revenue generation, the potential of that community is lessened, and so is the product.

Is there anything wrong with that? It depends. The OpenView community was one such community and it thrived for a time, but ultimately it faded. Certain “open source” management companies seem to have the goal of replicating OpenView (hence my label of the “OpenView model”) by creating software that is easy to expand via plugins (although the core code or enterprise-level code is closed), but since people are fleeing OpenView in droves I don’t believe that a similar model is sustainable for a long time.

If you write plugins for these companies, please don’t take what I am saying as an insult. As an open source guy I’m a firm believer in that what works, works. Almost all of these firms provide a lot of code under the GPL and that makes them head and shoulders above OpenView, but I have to wonder about a company that bases the majority of their revenue of software licensing and also calling themselves “open source”. What would happen if someone in the community contributed a patch that threatened that revenue stream? How can one encourage code contribution when the more code that gets contributed results in less money for the company? They can try to funnel the effort into “plugins” and tell everyone else to ignore the code behind the curtain, but that really defeats the purpose of open source.

These firms may be able to pull off creating a company worth a lot of money just by providing a useful, albeit non-free, product, but as free products become better and better, their software subscription model becomes weaker. I’ve heard it called “owning the bottom” and after originally disagreeing with the concept, I’ve become a believer. I’m betting that the next OpenView will come not from another commercial software company, but from an open source community, and I’m also betting that community is OpenNMS.

In the long run it will be the company that does services best that is worth the most. Even now the trend is moving toward services or software as a service. Which brings me to the future: what makes a services company successful?

I’ve been doing work in “open source” for over six years now, and I spend way to much time thinking about it. In fact I started writing this post when I couldn’t sleep after midnight one night, and I decided to get out of bed and write down my thoughts. As Morpheus says in the Matrix movie, there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. Having walked on this path for so long, I’ve come up with some ideas about how open source will impact the future, if not the present, and I wanted to share them (if just to formalize them for myself).

While I donate a large amount of time to The OpenNMS Project, my salary (and thus my mortgage) is paid by The OpenNMS Group. The OpenNMS Group is a services company. We don’t sell software, but we sell services in the form of support, consulting, training and custom development. For some reason, being a pure services company is seen by many who really ought to know (i.e investors) as being a “lifestyle” company, one that “can’t scale” and thus isn’t really worth investing in. There were times when I used to think they were right, but as with anything as new and novel as building a business on open source is, I’m now prone to believe that it is more of a case in that they can’t believe that the days of selling software are ending. Something, namely services, must rise to take its place.

The OpenNMS Group has been operating over the last several years with a strange business plan. We call it “spend less than you earn”. I know it sounds crazy, but it has worked for us so far (grin). But the time has come to seek out investment, and so I’ve been thinking of how can I explain what I’ve learned about open source to those busy investment people with necessarily short attention spans without requiring them to spend six years in the trenches like I have. The results are three blog posts: the Past, the Present and the Future. I plan to post these over the next three days, and I welcome any feedback my few but loyal readers may have.

The Past

The first real network management platform I was exposed to was SunNet Manager. It was one of the first graphical applications that allowed you to create a database of your network devices, and to both perform some tests (in the form of pings) on them as well as receive events (via either SNMP traps or log messages) from them. Sun developed it more as a toy than a serious application, and it wasn’t long before it was eclipsed by Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView Network Node Manager (NNM).

I got involved with NNM around version 2.2. HP had improved slightly on SunNet Manager but they had gone to great lengths to make it easy to integrate into their platform. The “open” didn’t stand for “open source”, but it was real easy to add new applications that would integrate via menus, graphics, and events. The actual NNM application did not do much – it could discover the network, place that information in a database, and receive events (as well as send “pings” and SNMP requests). Man was it ever fun to play with, and quite powerful despite its simplicity.

For example, suppose you were Bay Networks and you wanted to create a management application for your Wellfleet routers and Synoptics switches. NNM could discover those devices on the network, and using SNMP it would collect the sysObjectID so that it would “know” what type of device it had discovered. Using that ID, Bay could create custom icons that would display the device type, as well as menu items that would then launch external programs and pass to it information such as IP address. Then those applications could send events back in to NNM for display. Bay could focus on the management specifics for their equipment and let NNM handle all of the basic stuff.

This flexibility caused a huge community to spring up around NNM and then around the rest of the OpenView suite. HP provided an API that allowed people to write applications that tightly integrated with their platform, and a users group called the OVForum was started (although it looks like it is called “Vivit” now for some reason), without prompting from HP, to help bring the community together. I was deeply involved with the OVForum, namely through one of its founders, Paul Edmunds, who worked rather close to me in Charlotte, NC. Another person, Chip Sutton, who lived even closer in Durham, took the HP API and created one in Perl. Perl being the language of sysadmins at the time, it caused even more functionality to be added to OpenView.

At its peak around NNM version 5, the OVForum and its yearly conference boasted thousands of members, and it was hard to think of deploying a network management solution without it.

It has been my stated goal to replace OpenView with OpenNMS as the de facto management platform, so one may ask if OpenView was so great, why get rid of it?

Although OpenView was “open”, it was not “open source”. We were often frustrated as consultants working with the product with many of its shortcomings. Then, as HP grew and started to focus more on PCs, OpenView languished. Because the core of the system was closed, it could be hard to get it to do exactly what you needed.

OpenView VARs were often told they could expect 7 to 8 dollars in services for every dollar of software sold. While NNM was priced either for unlimited nodes or for nodes in groups of 250, some of the other OpenView components started using per node pricing which made the product expensive. Combined with services, IT departments started to see their budgets dwindle in order to implement OpenView.

OpenNMS was started to provide all of the functionality of OpenView (and other products) with none of the licensing costs. Being truly open source, all parts of it can be improved and changed where needed, thus it is very flexible and that flexibility reduces deployment time. Lack of licensing also reduces yearly support costs, which have been known to approach 25% of the purchase price of the original software. But the key here was to create a platform, open to all, but driven by services.

Whenever we go to conferences to talk about OpenNMS, invariably we get compared to Nagios. Often the tone is quite challenging, as in “How are you better than Nagios?” in much the same way that geeks are wont to argue “vi vs. emacs”, “KDE vs. Gnome” etc. and the idea seems that OpenNMS has to be “against” Nagios, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

In my mind open source is about stuff that works. As a hack I love vi, but many of my developer friends are fond of emacs (or were before Eclipse came along). If I stuck an emacs guy on vi he’d be less productive, the same as if I were put on emacs. Does this make one better than the other? I don’t think so.

Ethan Galstad registered NetSaint, the precursor to Nagios, on Sourceforge two months before OpenNMS, back in January of 2000. So while Nagios is better known by far (10 times the number of Google hits on average) we’ve been around for about the same time.

The extra notoriety has actually been somewhat of a blessing, since some of those companies attempting to market themselves as “open source” decided to infringe on Ethan’s Nagios trademark versus OpenNMS.

While I’ve never met Ethan in person (although he is supposed to stop by Dev-Jam this year), we have been looking out for each other’s projects for several years now and correspond via e-mail a couple of times a year. Before we announced our NRPE and NSClient support, I made sure to let Ethan know we were going to do it and sent him an OpenNMS shirt. A couple of weeks ago he returned the favor and I now have a cool Nagios shirt.

His tagline “Only the NSA Monitors More” is priceless. I seriously wish I had come up with it, although it is only true in the context of Nagios. Ethan is also a really nice guy, and it’s sad that people try to commercialize his work and the work of the Nagios community. At least he can still keep his sense of humour about it all.

At OpenNMS we strive to make sure that OpenNMS will always be free, and that OpenNMS will never suck. Nagios helps with the latter by driving us to be a better tool. We may sometimes compete, but we aren’t enemies, and I’ll proudly wear my Nagios shirt.

But I must say that at OpenNMS we have really cool clients, and we recently got a new one in Hawaii. So let me point out that the picture above was taken on the black sand beach of the Waipio Valley on the Big Island of Hawaii. Score one for OpenNMS (grin).

Man, I am tired. It’s been a long day.

I’m beginning to think that SCaLE is one of my favorite shows. It had a lot of the technical talent you’d expect from larger shows without a lot of the blatant commercialism.

I woke up this morning in a mad scramble to get my presentation slides done. I had never given this presentation before and on top of it I am trying to wean myself from Microsoft Office so I was using NeoOffice (OpenOffice) Impress which I wasn’t familiar with.

When I got to the room I was informed that the presentation was being both audio-taped and video-taped, and that I was going to have to use a microphone. Now those who have met me know I don’t need to use a microphone, and since I refused to stand still behind the podium I had to carry it around with me. I felt like a televangelist, which I guess in some ways, I am.

The room was pretty full, and there were a number of people out in the hallway. I can only assume they were trying to see what the fat man was yelling about. I actually managed to finish right on time, which was a miracle for me. The talks should be posted on the SCaLE website soon, so check it out if you are not faint of heart.

After the talk I ran into Zonker Brockmeier from Linux.com, and he asked me if I would do a five minute video with him talking about OpenNMS. I thought it was going to be along the lines of my FLOSS poscast, i.e. give and take, but Zonker put the camera on me and basically started rolling. He gave me a tip to look at him and not the camera, so of course I started goofing off. He threatened to use it (and later thought better of it) but he did send me a still.

By this time I’m dead and it’s not even lunch. I managed to sneak away to In-N-Out and grab my signature Double Double, Animal Style, with Fries and a Strawberry Shake, to be followed by a bunch of Altoids so as not to offend those in the booth from the onions.

The rest of the day went on in a blur. About 5pm we torn down the booth and went to the bar.

Many thanks to Gareth and the whole crew at SCaLE for a fantastic show, and please invite us back next year.

First thing this morning a guy leading a small group came up to the booth and said “Sell me on OpenNMS!”

“No”

I wish I had said it, but it was David. The guy was obviously taken aback, so David explained that what he needed to do was tell us what he required from a management solution, and we’d tell him whether or not OpenNMS was a good fit.

I’d been looking for a good example of how dealing with OpenNMS was different from other products, and this hit the nail on the head. Other products say “Come on in! Look at me! See how pretty I am! Buy me!” (sorry for all the exclamation points but if you’ve ever been to a trade show you know what I mean). OpenNMS is about solutions, and thus the first step is always to determine the nature of the problem that needs to be solved. Until that is done, there is really nothing to sell.

The first day at SCaLE flew by. We had steady booth traffic and I got to talk to a large number of cool people. The vibe here is much more along the lines of LISA versus, say, LinuxWorld, but without a lot of the “Why did you do it this way – defend yourself” that you get at the former conference.

By 5:30 I was really regretting having signed up for a Birds of a Feather session as I was wiped, but by 8pm I’d caught a second wind. We had about 20 or so people show up, and since the room didn’t have any A/V equipment (the projector had been removed promptly at the end of the last presentation) I just sat at the front and ran my mouth. OpenNMS is a fun story to tell, so I hope I didn’t bore the folks too much, and being tired I pretty much didn’t know when to stop. We met a couple of people who had been using the product and were really happy with it, and there were two guys from Doubleclick who had actually created a custom data collection plugin using OpenNMS 1.3. While they had little Java experience they were able to get it working, so I guess that’s a big compliment to Matt and his collectd rewrite.

Tomorrow I start off with my talk on OpenNMS case studies, and then I should be able to relax. I’m really looking forward to that.

Last week we hit a low of 11F at the farm. The lowest I’ve ever seen there was 8F, but the winter is not over yet, so it’s really nice to be sitting here in LA where the temperature is closer to 70F.

We’re at the Southern California Area Linux Expo (SCALE) where 1300 like-minded geeks and geekettes will be gathered together for two plus days of open source excitement. We have a booth in the heart of the expo floor, and there is a Birds of a Feather Session scheduled for tomorrow night where we hope to meet up with some of the OpenNMS faithful (old and new) to chat about what’s going on with the project, and on Sunday I’m giving a talk on OpenNMS and some cool case studies.

So far I like the vibe of the show. It reminds me more of LISA and less of LinuxWorld Expo. Speaking of LWE, I think my rants on the subject have gotten us permanently banned from the .org Pavilion, but I thought I’d try again to get us invited. I went to their site and searched on “Pavilion” but was met with an IIS “missing DLL” error. This was new to me but apparently the IDG websites are run on Windows. Heh, I just think it is funny that LinuxWorld Expo, arguably the largest open source conference held in the US, runs its website on Windows. Well, maybe that Apache thing will take off some day.

There is some other fun news in open source network management world. There was an article on Techtarget talking about the open source network management space. Of course, OpenNMS wasn’t mentioned once again (we are included in their Guide to Open Source Networking Tools though). I wrote the author and he was quite nice but he just hadn’t heard of us. Oh well, at least my three blog readers know where I’m coming from (grin). He did interview the father of open source network management, Ethan Galstad. Ethan started Net Saint when open source wasn’t cool, and he still remains one of the nicest guys in the business. Many people think that OpenNMS and Nagios are an either/or proposition and that we have to be enemies, but nothing is further from the truth. I’m eagerly awaiting my Nagios T-shirt and I’ll post a picture of me in it as soon as it arrives.

Speaking of Nagios, it looks like Groundwork is at it again. They’ve raised an additional US$12 million. The less that is said about them the better, but note that with the initial ~US$12 million they’ve managed to get “some 200” customers. Heh, we’re bootstrapped and have a good portion of that number, and trust me we spent way less than US$60K per customer (heck, in the beginning we spent way less than US$60K in *salaries*). Solarwinds is also mentioned in the article. We actually lost a client to Solarwinds back in the 1.1 days, but since then we have several of their users come over to OpenNMS. As a services company we don’t market software, but it is nice to get the occasional unsolicited plug that compares us to other options.

There was a post on the discuss list about Ziptie. I don’t know much about them, but they did hit my Google news reader with an OpenNMS integration. As our goal is nothing less than to become the de facto network management platform for everyone, we welcome this, but they had up a page that implied that The OpenNMS Group (the commercial company that maintains the OpenNMS project) was a partner. I wrote and suggested that they use the OpenNMS project logo (the community is much bigger than our little company) instead, and that “integrates with” is probably a better phrase than “partner”, and I also asked that they make some reference to the trademark owners of the images they used on the site. I thought I was nice and polite, but I must have done something wrong ’cause they never wrote back and they just removed the logo.

Oh well. I was a little upset that they used the tiniest logo out there for us, but I’ll get over it.

[2007-02-09 15:58 PST] Update: I just got a nice note from Brett Wooldridge, the Ziptie project lead, apologizing for the way that page was created. It was a misunderstanding and I sent in a nice big OpenNMS logo for them to use if they wish. [grin]

Anyway, back to the show. Remember that we have training in Utah in March and we are close to announcing Dev Jam 007 to be held in Minneapolis again the last week in July. Perhaps 2.0 will be done by then. (grin)