In the first part of this two part interview, I talk with David Dennis, Senior Director of Product Marketing at GroundWork Open Source. GroundWork has a new release, so I take this time to ask David how GroundWork’s been doing and what type of deployments they find themselves in, that is, where GroundWork is fitting in in the overall IT Management stack. David uses a brief explanation of the theory of comparative advantage to explain GroundWork’s theory that other IT Management vendors are looking to move up the data center management stack, leaving monitoring and management for others. We close out this first part by discussing how open source IT Management folks can fit into their idea.