Open Management Consortium: The Kids vs. The Stodgy in Systems Management

The Open Management Consortium, is finally public today. I’ve been talking with William “whurley” Hurley of Qlusters on and off about it for sometime, so it’s exciting to see it finally take shape.

What Is It?

The essence of the OMC’s mission is:

The Consortium will work to drive open standards for systems management within the industry, assisting IT managers and system administrators to custom-create solutions to best serve their business needs. One of the first projects will involve developing protocols for managing common IT infrastructure components, including information about servers, storage devices, configurations, networks models, middleware, applications and other relevant data, to create a unified approach to systems management for open source vendors and projects. The Consortium’s agenda also includes designing several integration paths for exchanging data with proprietary systems.

And the founding members are:

Nagios (sponsored by Ayamon), NetDirector (sponsored by Emu Software), openQRM (sponsored by Qlusters), openSIMS (sponsored by Symbiot), the Webmin project and the Zenoss project (sponsored by Zenoss, Inc.).

You can check out the rest of the site at www.open-management.com. Raven Zachary of 451 also has some commentary on the OMC.

How Real Is It?

I’ve spoken with several of the vendors involved, and they’re companies and software are very real. They have paying customers, roadmaps, and good systems management pedigree. I’ve also spoken extensively with some of the people involved, particularly, whurley, and I know he’s for real not only with his vision, but the execution of it.

As with any group, simply slapping up a web page, blog, and mailing list, snazzy as they may look, are simply the costs of doing business. The type and amount of activity on the mailing list over the next few months will be the best indicator — from afar — of how “real” the group is. The next mile-stone is developing some sort of interop mechanism — perhaps a standard — that each of the members support and ship. Once that’s accomplished, them the OMC will indeed, be very real.

And, by “real” I mean an active threat to The Big 4: BMC, IBM, CA, and HP…and, as we’ll see below, Microsoft.

The Zero Sum Game

The OMC’s goal to go up against The Big 4 is no big secret. Indeed, whurley said as much in an interview with Dan Farber last month:

Hurley described the coalition as a potential “800-pound gorilla alternative to IBM Tivoli” and other proprietary heavyweights, who he dissed as “old and stodgy” compared to the more fleet “user-driven innovations” that come from an open source ecosystem.

Along those lines, the first thing that’ll be fun to watch is the mailing list and the blog reaction. Getting open source systems management people talking on one mailing list is sure to be enjoyable. The OSS systems management people have a window open to cause some serious disruption in the systems management world, and ganging up together gives them a good shot at not only surviving, but thriving.

There’ll be a lot of excitement all around if Big 4 vs. OSS systems management goes zero-sum. Remember how much fun it was to think, talk, and write about Windows vs. Linux, and the watch Linux take out all the commercial Unixes?

Growing Instead of Killing

I’m not much for vendor sports, even when vendors are open source. In my ideal world, I’d prefer to see The Big 4 and the OMC partner up and work together. I’m pretty sure the “small” guys wouldn’t mind that at all, if it was genuine, but I’m somewhat pessimistic about the larger folks even smelling out the other camp: indeed, what’s the motivation. Of all The Big 4, CA has done something to make me think otherwise.

I’ve suggested that Microsoft team up with the likes of the OMC, and the same applies to The Big 4 as well. The great thing about “open thinking” is that everyone is welcome to the party as long as they’re not an ass. So if you’re one of BMC, IBM, CA, or HP, I’d suggest figuring out how to become part of the OMC, ideally by open sourcing something yourself, getting involved with standardization, or something as base as sponsoring them. There’s plenty of standardization work to be done that will be beneficial no matter who does it, and a body like the OMC could be a catalyst for actually getting a usable and ubiquitous systems management standard. Old King SNMP has sit on the throne for a long, long, long time, and the fracture between WS-Management and WSDM will just be a distraction from whatever the OMC or others might come up with.

The benefits for the OMC of Big 4 involvement would be, essentially, an instant victory in their mission: shaking up systems management both technologically and price-wise. As always, Sun is the wild-card with their yet to be open sourced systems management suite. Involvement from Sun would be fantastically exciting to see, perhaps we can arrange something if both parties are interested in smelling each other out.

Microsoft & the Mid-market

For the OMC, of course, I still believe that Microsoft is their biggest competition: the small to mid-market is going to be both Microsoft’s and the OMC member’s bread and butter for the next few years.

Indeed, assimilating or “winning” against Microsoft is probably the gate-keeper for even getting on the battle field with The Big 4. At the very least (and here I go sinking into military analogies again, apologies all around), the OMC will have a two front war to fight against Microsoft and The Big 4.

I have no doubt that the open source systems management crew has and will have the technology to do it: the real question is if they can change the culture of enterprise systems management to buy from them. Again, when it comes to smaller folks, working together is always the best shot at that kind of marketering.

Innovation

At the very least, I’m hoping that the energy and the passion of the OMC members will give the systems management a big shot in the arm: there’s plenty of innovation to be had outside of the mindset that’s existed for years. I’ve seen The Big 4 talking a good talk along those lines, but they haven’t had motivation to go into hyper-mode and deliver at a rapid pace. Those thick maintenance revenues are keeping the halls awfully quite. Hopefully, the OMC will live up to my expectations and light a big enough fire under the whole systems management market, themselves includes, to spice things up. These next few months will be telling

Disclaimer: Microsoft, BMC, IBM, and Sun are clients.

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