Connect several well known open source projects with a nifty, proprietary GUI, and you have a product that's got a price advantage as well as a good business case.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [October 13, 2006]

San Francisco, Calif.-based GroundWork Open Source has a simple mission: to take on the big network monitoring products (such as HP's OpenView, IBM's Tivoli, and BMC) by linking open source projects together and presenting the resulting data to users using its own middleware.

That's how Tony Barbagallo, GroundWork Open Source's vice president of marketing and product management, describes it. "We started seeing real innovation in open source projects that handle infrastructure monitoring," he says. "Initially, the company took some of those open source projects and, on a customer by customer basis, would configure them to meet the needs of each individual customer."

Today, the company that was founded in March of 2004 has a clearer mission. It develops the user interface that links the projects together and sells subscriptions for support and maintenance. The company continues to offer the more in-depth services that gave it its initial success. "About half our customers are subscribers," says Barbagallo. "The other half pay for a turnkey services offering in which we do much more, including train staff."

The company also offers the open source code for free.

It translates into three product lines under the GroundWork Monitor name: Professional, Small Business, and Open Source.

Open source innovation
The list of open source projects that are linked to GroundWork Monitor Professional is quite long. In addition, some GroundWork Open Source code is itself open source: Guava, MonArch, and others.

While the company relies on the innovation of the well known open source projects such as Apache, it is also building its own community of developers. Some of those developers are companies, such as NovaCoast, an integrator, and Blue Gecko, an MSP.

As to the rest of the community, Barbagallo says that's just beginning. "We recently published our build process, less than a month ago."

Some of GroundWork Open Source's products are under a dual license, listed as "GNU General Public License (GPL), GroundWork Copyright," which seems odd to us, but Barbagallo explains that version 2.0 of the GPL says that as long as code bases remain separate, this is allowed. Of course, any changes to GPL code must themselves be made available under GPL.

The customers
Barbagallo has a clear idea of who his customers are. "The sweet spot initially was customers who couldn't afford higher end proprietary systems. But now that customers understand open source between, we're not only competing on price, although our customers do pay only about 20 to 30 percent of the price of proprietary software."

Customers now see open source software as adaptable software. One customer, for example, had built a custom Java app but were unable to monitor it with proprietary software.

"People in situations like that can come to a company like GroundWork," says Barbagallo. "We can build a profile to monitor their app, and other tech savvy companies would be happy to do it for them."

Pricing and availability
GroundWork Monitor Professional costs $16,000 per year, and allows the subscriber to monitor an unlimited number of devices from one server. (Barbagallo estimates that the maximum number of devices one server could monitor is between 500 and a few thousand, depending on the devices being monitored.)

GroundWork Monitor Small Business enables the monitoring of up to 50 devices for $8,000 per year.

GroundWork Open Source is, of course, free, and can monitor an unlimited number of devices.

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