Although the company's only two years old, the founders of this open source hardware and software startup have been into remote connectivity since 1985.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [April 25, 2006]

Bob Waldie was Managing Director of Stallion Technologies and Tony Merenda was CTO. Stallion was acquired by Lantronix Technologies in 2002, and Merenda left to co-found ePipe, a company that allows ISPs and other companies to bond multiple broadband links.

Today, Waldie is chairman and CEO of Opengear and Merenda is president.

Opengear provides open source remote connectivity hardware and software. "It's not just open source software, it's hardware as well," explains Waldie, on the phone from Brisbane, Australia, where the company does its R&D (its sales are generally in Europe and North America, where the company has sales offices).

"We provide the circuit diagrams, etc. The focus for people working with us is not so much to copy what we've done, which is easy, because we provide everything they'd need, but to improve upon it. That's open source: we open up the technology so as to make it easy for others to improve it."

Let power be open
Open source hardware, however, is surely more complex than the geek and a computer model of open source software, we suggest. "It does involve capital," Waldie admits. "Yu cannot improve hardware with a keystroke. But the other side of the coin is that it has the same potential that the open source software initiative has shown."

There may be few inspirations for open source hardware as opposed to open source software, Waldie says, but there's one big success story: IBM. Recently, IBM launched the Power.org initiative, in which, he says, the company retains its rights but opens its technology so that its partners can build on what it has produced. "The goal for IBM is to build a community to broaden the development team beyond those who work at IBM," he says.

In a sense, it's a return to IBM's roots. "It's like the first IBM PCs," Waldie says. "When you bought a PC you got a technical manual with full circuit diagrams."

This allowed other manufacturers to add to and develop products for IBM PCs. "IBM dominated the PC market in part because they took a totally novel open aporach," he claims.

In contrast, many tech companies today try to emulate the Microsoft market dominance model. "If you can dominate a market, you can set the standard going forward and keep changing the rules to make it tough for market followers to keep up. Microsoft is just open enough that it is not seen to be anti-competitive. That's the only bound. When you get successful, you're not allowed to be too successful."

Waldie says Opengear and other open source providers hope to provide a different model for the tech industry, one in which collaboration rather the domination is the norm. To date, he notes, industries collaborate only when regulators force them to. The international telecommunications market, he says, is required by regulation to be interoperable, and therefore is.

So how do you make money?
In this business, it helps to have relationships with distributors, and the co-founders of the company are taking advantage of the fact that they've been selling embedded Linux systems since 1985. Waldie says the company has distributors in Japan and Germany and the U.S. that he and Merenda have dealt with "in previous incarnations."

He adds that Opengear wants to make the equipment but does not want to market it. "We believe we can do development and support at a competitive price. We're engineers, not marketers. We're not experts at gaining mindshare, delivering through the channel, an winning the big deals. We're the backend technology supplier, although most of our channel sales are under the Opengear brand name."

"The company was founded by a group of addicted workaholics," jokes Waldie. "Two years ago, we were looking for a market niche that was growing and changing and decided that remote infrastructure control, for communications and IT infrastructure, was growing and changing. OS developers, both Microsoft and Linux, were adding management tools that had not been there before."

Initially, the company targeted the distributed retail and distributed enterprise market. "Systems administrators in these companies see their data centers as a safe zone and the branches as hostile territory. We make it low cost and easy to operate so that these businesses can distribute data center safety at the branch office."

Other customers have embraced the company's inexpensive remote access devices, such as universities and business service providers.

The key in every case, beyond price, is ease of use. In every organization, technological knowledge is concentrated at the center. "Many branch office administrators were brought up in a Windows environment, in a push button sort of world. We design it so that the technical person at the core can set it up and distribute it. Similarly, an ISP can set it up for small business customers and preconfigure it so a small business IT manager can load up a software wizard at home and connect to a particular system on a remote site."

The tools Opengear sells enable administrators to use secure SSH to access a box for disaster recovery, remote power cycle, or similar operations. It could be the sudden need to fix rules on an SMB's firewall that has suddenly started blocking all traffic. It could be the need to revert to earlier software version ("this issue is always either faulty documentation or user error, depending on whom you ask," says Waldie). It could be the need to power cycle equipment ("the ability to remote power cycle equipment is attractive to those who live in the Microsoft blue screen environment," Waldie says).

Opengear's latest software product is the SDTConnector, designed to eliminate the complexities of setting up SSH configs, providing a push button environment instead of a CLI using Windows and Java.

Opengear's hardware products range from cards and individual Secure Device Servers to Console Servers that allow secure remote access to many devices.

Pricing and availability
Opengear's products are available now. For your local distributor, see the company website.

The CM4001 with two ports, ships with SDTConnector and is priced at $295 in the U.S. and Canada.

The following models are available:

• CM4001: 1 or 2 serial ports, 10 concurrent SSH tunnels
• CM4008: 8 serial ports, 10 concurrent SSH tunnels
• CM4116: 16 serial ports, 50 concurrent SSH tunnels
• CM4148: 48 serial ports, 50 concurrent SSH

The CM4148 is priced at about $1,500.

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