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This week, John and I are joined by Reductive labs‘ (the Puppet people) Luke Kanies. We start out talking about the current state of Puppet, which gets us into a discusion of how Puppets user base reacts to quarterly releases vs. the usual multi-year releases in IT management. On the topic of open source applications like Puppet Luke tells us about the freebie expectations of some large, commercial users of Puppet (see title of this episode).
The topic of paid-for grade support brings up the topic of what Reductive Labs is doing to build further products around Puppet. I ask Luke what to tell us more of what they’ve been working on (which they’ll commercialize). He tells us it’s along the lines of a monitoring dashboards, reporting, and correlation tools for diagnosing problems in the realms that Puppet controls.
Getting into the general IT management news part of the show, we talk about:
- StreamStep – they’re a startup around release management who I saw an interesting demo from recently.
- Splunk is hitting up all the cloud vendors.
- Luke speaks to the idea that These Tough Economic Times will be good for open source companies. John gives his take based on past Tough Times.
- ManageEngine – I met with these guys (now with an office in Austin!) and was impressed with the scope and scale of their stuff and embarised/shocked I hadn’t heard of them before.
- Canonical Landscape – Stephen O’Grady and I had a briefing on Landscape recently and, as it’s done as a SaaS it’s interesting to check out.
A factual correction: the situation with the company in Sweden that John talks about around 10:30 is inaccurately described. Far from telling the user to "shit in their hat", we agreed to sell them a half-day of remote consulting. Our estimate would have been pretty spot-on if not for the coincidental firewall change in the customer's environment that led to thousands of SNMP traps per second hitting their openNMS installation, which was not sized to process events at that rate. As so often happens, the customer didn't make the connection ("I haven't changed anything else, really!"), but we worked the incident through to a resolution that left the customer very happy with the experience.
Should we have insisted that the customer buy annual support? In hindsight, probably so. We hope that they'll buy a contract anyway, and take advantage of the COVER promotion to get a free seat of training bundled with it. Even if this client doesn't turn into a renewable revenue source, we're still happy to know that openNMS is allowing their sysadmins to get some sleep during the holiday shopping season.
jeffg: thanks for the correction!
Thanks for the mention, Cote. It was a pleasure meeting you too. Merry Christmas!