The Open Management Consortium has been founded by a group of open source systems management and monitoring players, including Qlusters Inc, Emu Software Inc, Zenoss Inc, Symbiot Inc, the Webmin project, and Ayamon LLC, the consultancy company of Nagios creator, Ethan Galstad.
Together the organizations hope to create more awareness of open source software for systems management, create standards that enable interoperability and integration, and work together on common projects.
We can all work together, not just on the technology, but also on the sales, marking and overall evangelism of open source systems management, Qlusters chief technology officer and OMC co-founder, William Hurley, told Computer Business Review. We’ve got more projects involved that we’ll announce later, but we’re starting with six and we want to address the number-one problem that people in data centers are facing, and that is choice.
OMC co-founder and Emu Software vice president of strategy, Mark Hinkle, said the companies involved had seen the success of open source stacks in other areas such as the Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python LAMP stack and wanted to replicate that in systems management.
The modularity of systems administration applies itself to that, he said, What we’re looking for is to make people aware that you can build a single management console and it’s not necessary to have a single vendor for that.
Hurley and Hinkle said the goal of the OMC is not to create a single open source systems management framework to compete with the likes of CA, BMC Software, IBM’s Tivoli, or HP’s OpenView, and maintained that an aim is to improve interoperability with those vendors’ products.
This is not an affront to the proprietary members, we’re helping open source get organized, said Hurley. We invite them to use the fruits of our labor, and we also invite advice and guidance. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel.
Another goal for the OMC is to open up the process for standards development, which remains closed to smaller vendors, users and individual developers, according to Hurley. The way we drive these things is broken and we need to fix it. The role we have is to open source the development of that, he said. We share the goal of user-driven innovation. Open standards to date have not been influenced by the people who use them. We want all the discussions around activities to happen out in the open and the price to participate is your participation.
For the first six months, however, the goal is very much one of increasing awareness of open source systems management software. Linux has crossed the chasm but open source has not, so acceptance and awareness and perception in the market is the number one goal for the first six months, said Hurley. We take a view of abundance. By working together, we’ll increase the opportunities for all of our projects.
