FiveRuns Corp is releasing a hosted systems management service that is initially targeted at SMBs that are interested in open source offerings like the Linux OS, Apache web server, TomCat J2EE container, JBoss appserver, or MySQL database. Customers will download a rich web client based on Ajax, Open Rico, and Ruby on Rails technologies.
The driving notion is that Windows is popular with SMBs because of its GUI-driven simplicity. And, while open source offerings like Linux might be attractive to this cost-conscious market, few have the skills or desire to master the cryptic, command line interfaces that permeate them.
FiveRuns’ approach is providing the same kind of GUI-driven approach found with well-known Windows systems management offerings like NetIQ. But while NetIQ is limited to Windows, FiveRuns will support the open source stuff.
Like the open source software that it supports, FiveRuns is open source as well. However, unlike Linux or Apache projects, the company doesn’t expect a huge community of developers to emerge around it.
We don’t expect a community to do our work for us, admitted marketing director Dave Wilby, who said that the idea of making the offering open source was to keep the business model compatible with the products it was supporting. If somebody came along and developed a plug in for an app that we don’t support, we would be open to it.
But it will try cultivating a community of best practices around system problems and fixes. So, instead of cutting and pasting error messages in Google, then wading through 30 or 40 references, FiveRuns will host a community where problems and solutions will be posted. It will invite customers to post solutions, and it will post the results of robots that crawl the web for similar solutions. To keep the site useful, it will be moderated and filtered.
Although initially targeting its sights on open source, FiveRuns plans eventually to expand to Windows and popular offerings like SQL Server as well.
As for the name, Americans might be under the impression that the founder loved baseball. Actually it came from a local creek where the founder used to go fishing.
