Open Source IT Management

SAN FRANCISCO—August 21, 2007—GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com), the leader in open source systems and network management software, today announced milestones including record revenues, booming channel sales, and surpassing the 500th subscription mark for GroundWork Monitor Professional, the company’s flagship IT management product.

“Now more than ever, open source alternatives to systems and network management software are establishing a secure foothold in a market historically dominated by feature-bloated, expensive proprietary solutions,” said Ranga Rangachari, CEO of GroundWork Open Source. “GroundWork believes open source provides ‘just right’ management functionality at a fraction of the cost, and the market has responded.”

In April, Gartner released a report discussing the threat that open source poses to the “Big 4” (HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol). Recently, the 451 Group issued a report, entitled “Managing in the Open: The Next Wave of Systems Management,” that came to a similar conclusion.

"Open source is breathing new competitive life into systems management, ultimately forcing the established vendors to respond in their products, pricing and strategies," said Raven Zachary, Research Director, Open Source at The 451 Group, a technology industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation, in his report. "Open source could give potential challengers the cost and ease-of-implementation advantages they need to take on such formidable opponents." These comments appeared in an independent report titled “Managing in the Open: The Next Wave of Systems Management,” which was published in July of this year (see Editor’s Note below).

Expanding Customer List and Channel

GroundWork’s recent customer wins include TravelCLICK, Celestica, Metropolitan Utilities District of Nebraska, Applied Computer Systems, and DSP Global. Of note, more than a quarter of new subscription customers either replaced Big 4 installations or were chosen after competing with Big 4 vendors in the sales process.

GroundWork also continued its upward momentum in the channel, deriving over a third of the business directly from channel partners. New additions to GroundWork’s Global Partner Network include nCell, NetDirect, Inscope Solutions, Carahsoft Technologies, Prevalent Networks, and DSP Global.

Existing notable GroundWork Partners Unisys and Redhat (via RHX) drove a larger percentage of second quarter sales than all previous quarters combined.

GroundWork Gives to and Learns From the Community

In late June, GroundWork announced the commencement of GroundWork University, a new comprehensive training curriculum for GroundWork customers and partners. GroundWork University offers GroundWork customers and partners all over the world the chance to receive training through various means -- including classes, lectures, and hands-on lab exercises offered at GroundWork’s corporate headquarters, on site at the customers’ facilities or on-line. Since the launch of GroundWork University, over 100 customers have been trained and certified.

Additionally, at LinuxWorld, GroundWork reconvened its Open Source Council, comprised exclusively of eight lead developers from today's best-of-breed open source IT infrastructure and network monitoring projects around the world. New participants included Ethan Galstead of Nagios and Howard Jones of Network Weathermap. Others that also participated last year include leads from several popular open source projects (including RRDtool, Cacti, and Ganglia).

GroundWork Monitor Professional Adopts SOA

At the Red Hat Summit in May, GroundWork announced the latest release of GroundWork Monitor Professional, which includes the first Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) development framework for open source IT management. At the same time, GroundWork released GroundWork Factory, a central resource for information, expertise, and reusable extensions for Groundwork’s partners, customers and the community. GroundWork Factory leverages the IT Management SOA of GroundWork Monitor Professional to deliver a unique set of services for service level management, as well as a repository of dashboards, profiles, reports, and integration best practices.

In early August, GroundWork announced enhanced support for monitoring and management for Virtualized Environments and for Java applications and services within GroundWork Monitor Professional. GroundWork’s enhanced virtualization functionality provides administrators with quick and easy access to data that is traditionally difficult to access due to parameters of virtual machines.

About GroundWork

San Francisco-based GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (http://www.GroundWorkopensource.com) is the fastest growing provider of open source network and systems management software, delivering enterprise-class IT management solutions that offer unprecedented network, system and application availability at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions. An integral part of GroundWork’s “Just Right IT management” philosophy is to ensure that its software and services seamlessly integrate with a customer’s management solutions – thus preserving their existing investment while simultaneously providing value. GroundWork’s solutions are in use at organizations like AOL, SAIC, Seton Hall University, Siemens, WebMD and World Bank. GroundWork’s solutions are available from GroundWork, its partners including Redhat, 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.

Editor’s Note: The 451 Group’s report, “Managing in the Open: The Next Wave of Systems Management,” referenced above, is an independently-produced report that was neither sponsored by nor otherwise funded directly by GroundWork Open Source. The report and its entire contents are the sole property of The 451 Group, copyright 2007, and are reproduced here by permission. The entire contents of this report are available at www.the451group.com

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Ray George
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