The Business Case for Open Source Management Tools

Originally posted in InfoWorld, http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2006/03/the_business_ca.html:

The Business Case for Open Source Management Tools
Guest Editorial by Ranga Rangachari, CEO, Groundwork

Vendor overshot is as bad today as it ever was — particularly with management tools. On the one hand, chances are you’re paying through the teeth for a lot of functionality that you’ll never use (as your systems and networking tools are engineered to meet the needs of the largest enterprises). On the other hand, you’re being confronted with solutions that themselves are a bear to install and configure (largely because of all of these complex features and add-ons that you’ll never use).

HP’s OpenView, for example, is a market leader in IT infrastructure monitoring, boasting an enormous feature-set and a hefty price tag. That’s all well and good, unless you’re a mid-sized business (or smaller) that needs a solid monitoring solution but is limited by budget and/or human resources with the necessary training and expertise to tame the monster. “Functionality overkill” has left many without invitations to the party.

The business case discussions around open source today tend to focus pretty narrowly on the acquisition costs. But one of the intriguing open source business discussions that you’ll see continue to play out over the next few years is the idea that open source gives you more flexibility to deploy “just enough.” When you use a monitoring tool such as Nagios, for example, you get much of the basic functionality that you would get from an OpenView, but you forego that extra percentage of features (that you pay dearly for if you go with a mature, proprietary monitoring tool).

So as your organization evaluates open source IT monitoring tools, the question is how much you need that extra percentile of features. For the incremental features you get from a proprietary solution beyond what is offered via open source tools, you face an order of magnitude more cost.

The very large enterprises are the ones for whom the ‘nice to have’ features were designed. For mid-sized companies, there’s no question that the best value is at the knee of the curve, where they get a lot of that functionality, miss a few of the “nice to haves,” but save an absolute ton of money on the acquisition cost, the configuration / installation, and the ongoing expertise required to maintain the monitoring tool.

Over the next few installments, I plan to talk about some specific open source-based IT monitoring and management tools that companies should have an eye on.