Hyperic, Systems Management Innovation, and Breaking Up Hegemonies

I spoke with several of the folks from Hyperic today. As you may recall, they went the open source route a few weeks ago. James and I spoke with them a little while ago, but we (RedMonk) had to cut the conversation short that day for another time.

This time, Javier and crew were kind enough to spend 90 minutes on the call. Their offering was impressive, so much so that my initial instinct is to warn the Big 4 people I know about them ;> But, of course, I do tend to get Kool-aidy about things, so we’ll see if further road testing, customers, and more prodding takes the red stain off my lips.

That self-disclaiming aside, because you can download both versions and try them out — one is free to use, the other is a trial — if you’re in systems management, I’d go check it out. I’ll be doing the same and futzing around with it.

Developer wise, their SIGAR framework looks swanky: they’ve abstracted several of the core command line tools you’d use in *nix system management into a cross-platform (OS, that is) API. So, you could “run” iostat on Windows. All you systems management coders out there can see how that would be helpful. They’ve GPL’ed SIGAR, obviously as a “we want to be open, but protective” move…which is fine: you can still OEM it if you want to make cash off/with it.

As always, I’ll have a more formal write-up of the briefing. At the moment though, I’m impressed by the technology I saw in the briefing today: as I told them a couple times, it seemed like they’ve been innovating in a space that’s otherwise been moribund in favor of focusing on high level business over nuts-and-bolts.

Innovation in Systems Management

More generally — and, thus, even more exciting to me — I’ve been seeing a good amount of innovation from many of the “small” systems management people I talk with. From new approaches to haruspicy, like nVision, to clean, simple, and targeted approaches to IT management like Spiceworks (which has it’s new, new revenue model as well), there’s a large amount of innovation happening in the systems management world that moves beyond the old wine in new bottles I’ve seen for awhile. I’ve been especially happy to see that most people (like SourceLabs and Splunk/CA) are thinking about cross-silo, collaborative systems management services instead of locking up the boundaries and flows of their platforms to behind-the-firewall.

More importantly, as many of the folks I talk with are quick to point out, the SMB space has gotten short-shrift over the past few years in this area as The Big 4 and others have climbed the org-chart for sales, sauntering away from LOB and “senior level admin” (as Hyperic put it) toolsy sales.

Chasing the Revenue

On that train of thought: I’m not entirely dismissive of many of the C-level visions that the Big 4 (and others) have been putting out of late — BSM, to use my alum’s phrase for it. As these “small” people continue to nip at and then bite chunks out of heals, there’s a chance to standardize the interaction between the “lower level” stuff and the Biz-level spanning layer above it all. That is, it’ll take a lot of cash and people-time to hammer out those Biz-level visions into code that doesn’t require armies of consultants to glue everything together. Instead of focusing on the lower level monitoring and management — which the “small” folks may soon do better in many of the cases than the “large” folks — companies with the capital and vision/plans to innovate at the Biz-level should look into shifting their development up the stack as well.

The notion of “defending the chasm” against these “small” folks is the wrong metaphor. Instead, the Big 4 should go dig out new chasms, and then cross those instead of sniping off “intruders.” Put yet another way, there’s some soul searching to be done about where the value in systems management is and how much revenue can be extracted from each part of it. While the small folks can survive off the “basics” of management, monitoring, and making sense of the piles of data, I’m not too sure there’s high enough pile of cash on the table for medium to long term revenue at the scale that the Big 4 need if that’s their primary sale. More importantly, spending resources to do both the basics and the Biz-level might require more than any pure software shop can handle.

Software Hegemonies and Fragmentation

That, of course, is my more general concern that being a large, publicly traded pure software company without a monopoly (market- and/or mind-share-wise) is increasingly more difficult. The fueling of this concern comes from the combination of open source and the flattening of software market niches. By flattening I mean something akin to “fragmentation,” or, at least, the effect of a fragmented market. Where there may have once been a hegemony, mind-share is now federated across many companies and projects. For example, in systems management, or what could happen with JEE and .Net if both don’t step to it with multi-language platforms.

Software hegemonies were previously based on controlling distribution and talent pools, but with The Network, those two things are more difficult, if impossible, to control. Also, of course, after The Bubble, we all (still) think we can create the billion dollar company…well, perhaps we’ve been humbled into thinking it will only be a million dollar company. Point being: more talented people are willing to go out and take the risk of creating their own software company instead of cozying up the usual paycheck-patrons. And the result is looking to be software that companies will actually buy.

Disclaimer: BMC and Sun are clients.

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