IT Management For Higher Education

EDUCAUSE (Chicago, IL)—May 28, 2008—GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com), the leader in commercial open source systems and network management software, announced today that it has signed 18 leading Universities worldwide as customers. Schools from the University of Wyoming to the University of Adelaide in Australia have deployed GroundWork Monitor, lowering IT costs, while getting the same world-class features and capacity of proprietary alternatives.

University IT environments are as large, complex and demanding as conventional corporate IT environments, yet have fewer resources – money, staff and time – to deal with those environments. Compounded with the disparate demands of numerous constituencies, challenging security requirements, and the arrival of new IT users every semester, university IT managers have to walk a fine balance between providing reliable and secure computing while closely managing costs.

In a recent Gartner report, Open Source in Higher Education¹, analyst Jan-Martin Lowendahl stated, “OSS is already a part of most higher education institutions and if it’s not, chances are high that it is part of an institution that stakeholders (such as researchers and students) collaborate with.” In addition he added, “…some of the perceived drawbacks of close-source software, like licensing/maintenance costs, available support, vendor lock-in, adaptability and pace of change, has led to a high and increasing adoption rate of OSS in higher education.”

Universities have chosen GroundWork Monitor to help unify diverse open source IT point solutions into an overarching, consolidated view of their networks and systems, while simultaneously increasing server/admin ratio and maintaining to open source extensibility. Additionally, GroundWork provides a means to provide increased levels of support and reliability for their IT monitoring needs, without requiring additional staffing or resources.

“The biggest challenge in our university environment is being able to coordinate campus wide monitoring efforts while maintaining economies,” said Tom Ammon, network engineer at the University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC). “Because of GroundWork’s extensibility, we are able to collaborate with multiple departments across campus and leverage the talent of other system administrators to gain central visibility into the health of our systems. As we continue to increase our monitoring efforts we will be able to have a birds-eye-view of the university using GroundWork Monitor.”

“Many of the open source sub-components of GroundWork had their beginnings in academia, so it makes sense that they’d be a natural fit for University and research environments,” said David Lilly, co-founder and CEO of GroundWork Open Source. “GroundWork Monitor then returns the benefit of a unified system and network management solution to academia allowing the focus to be upon teaching and research instead of infrastructure availability.”

The University of California Santa Cruz, University at Buffalo, Lenoir-Rhyne College, Liberty University and many more use GroundWork Monitor. To learn more about GroundWork’s benefits for Universities please visit: http://www.groundworkopensource.com/landing/edu.html

About GroundWork

San Francisco-based GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (http://www.groundworkopensource.com) is the market leader in open source network and systems management software, delivering enterprise-class network, system and application management solutions at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.

GroundWork's best of breed approach gives customers the flexibility to use diverse open source and proprietary technologies together under a unified interface, allowing users to leverage the advantages of open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy management tools. GroundWork’s solutions are in use at organizations like Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, SAIC, Seton Hall University, Siemens, and World Bank. GroundWork’s solutions are available from GroundWork, its partners including Red Hat, Unisys, Fujitsu, and a worldwide network of channel partners. The company is privately held, with investments from Canaan Partners, Mayfield Fund, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.

1. Gartner, Inc. "Open Source in Higher Education, 2008" by Jan-Martin Lowendahl, March 24, 2008.