Big win for open source in IT management
Published:01-November-2007
By BR staff writer
Notch it up as a victory for open source over enterprise software. Zenoss, a provider of open source IT management software, has beaten off competition from four leading commercial software providers to land a deal at global technology firm UTStarcom.
According to Annapolis, Maryland-based Zenoss, UTStarcom, which is a publicly-listed $2.7bn firm dabbling in the IPTV and broadband wireless markets, has chosen its Zenoss Enterprise software to monitor the health and performance of its IT infrastructure
Zenoss is making hay of the fact that UTStarcom chose its open source over that of several established commercial IT management suppliers including the "big four" of like IBM, HP, Computer Associates and BMC, which were also evaluated.
"We found solutions from the large vendors were pricey with recurring annual costs and consultancy fees, and lacked the flexibility along with ease of customization they needed," said Ari Bose, CIO of UTStarcom.
He explained that UTStarcom needed to globally monitor system usage, performance, event collection and alert notification, with basic reporting.
"We were operating in a reactive mode with no application or infrastructure visibility. With 70+ corporate applications supporting the business, spread over 500+ systems, it became apparent that a system was required that would enable us to be proactive in how we support our infrastructure, applications and end users."
Bose said the company tried out various other open source IT management systems including Nagios, What's Up Gold, Big Sister, MRTG, and Cricket, with limited success.
"They were geographically localized doing basic state monitoring and lacked the ability to scale to an enterprise solution."
