If you’re looking for a free solution, you often get what you pay for. I think the open source conversation has to shift from “free” to quality and value. Access to source code allows everyone to polish and/or enhance the code.

We also need the IT media to offer both sides of the story. As you’ve pointed out, a large number of open source companies have struggled to monetize their products … and many will go out of business.

Think about it: Only Red Hat has managed to launch a major open source IPO in the past decade. MySQL chose to sell to Sun; SUSE Linux sold out to Novell. The lack of IPOs suggests that the open source model needs refining.

I see value in a blended approach — MSPs should open their eyes to both open and closed source approaches, picking and choosing best-of-breed solutions.

But MSPs who completely ignore open source are over looking some great opportunities.

Mark Hinkle
VP of Community
http://www.zenoss.com
mrhinkle (at) zenoss.com

Zenoss quote Rackspace as a customer, and no doubt that’s true. But did you know that Rackspace are also major customers of Nimsoft, and have been for 4+ years. See the press release here http://www.nimsoft.com/mspzone/news/press-releases/2006-18-11.php

They also quote OpSource as a customer, and I happen to know that Opsource are also customers of multiple other tools as well.

So…when Zenoss are quoting these companies as “our top MSP references”, are they really saying that they “downloaded our software and are using it in a small part of their business” or are they saying that they are running their mission critical business with their products?

The title of the article includes the word “(Again)” and I think you are spot on Joe. Without wishing to be a cynic, but “opensource” monitoring companies like Zenoss have to make money too and if the software is “free” then they have to charge a fortune for services. After all, last I checked I didn’t see many other of the opensource monitoring vendors growing their business much (several will fail in the next 12 months).

An MSP’s business is all about providing a quality customer experience and to do that they need a provider of monitoring software that actually wrote the code themselves and are going to be there to support them and understand their business.

Sure, there are always going to be MSPs that are looking for the cheapest possible alternative, but as you scale the business, quality of service becomes a much more important differentiator.

I’d invite your readers to check out the Nimsoft MSP Zone, http://www.nimsoft.com/mspzone/index.php

As we like to say, “we are not the first monitoring solution that an MSP will need, but we are last”.

1. 18,000 customer deployments
2. 20,000 downloads per month
3. 750,000 downloads in total since launch

Interesting stats, to say the least.