IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » February 2007

February 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

The Piranha Effect

TAGS: Open Source

I work for GroundWork Open Source. At a recent company meeting, our CEO Ranga Rangachari gave an analogy regarding open source that was unique, a little humorous, but right on the mark...

"One could argue that hippos are a useful metaphor for large, ungainly, incumbent, legacy, monolithic proprietary software vendors.

There is another metaphor from the animal kington that describes quite a different approach by GroundWork.

Consider the Piranha.

By itself, a Piranha is almost harmless. One Piranha will never take down a hippo, for example.

But what happens if piranha school? They can and do gobble up the hippo. Though rare, it is happening...and happening successfully."

In the market for network and systems monitoring, GroundWork Open Source is pioneering a new business model built on marshaling more than 100 open source projects to attack an $8 billion industry. Some of these projects, such as Nagios and RRDtool are already well known. Others, such as Ganglia, are not. On their own, none of these projects offer a complete solution to systems and network monitoring and so are unable to seize much market share. But together, the sum is truly greater than the parts.

Stitched together so customers can use them easily, these projects solve systems and network management problems for larger and smaller companies alike, whereas HP OpenView and its hippo cousins are product overkill for all but the largest 2,000 enterprises in the world.

The Big 4 systems management vendors BMC, CA, HP, and IBM may want to keep a closer eye on the murky, muddy waters in which they wade.

Posted by Harper Mann on February 28, 2007 10:07 AM