Op5 is a Swedish company which delivers and implements software for qualified system monitoring. By using products for open source software, they create big competition against giants like HP OpenView and IMB’s Tivoli. Today they launch the new versions of their two new products op5 Logserver and op5 Monitor.
Op5’s products are made up of Op5 Monitor, op5 Statistics and op5 LogServer. Today the new versions are released of op5 Monitor with version number 3.2 and op5 LogServer 2.0. Among the new things in these new versions is for example more liberty to choose operating system, hardware, support and service.
The products consists of carefully packaged and customized programs where the base components are built on open source software. Names like Nagios, Cacti, NSClient++, MySQL, Apache, Hypergraph are some of the components.
Op5 aims to get costumers that cannot afford with down times because of a unusable system. The company was formed 2003 and among the clients we find Aftonbladet (a big Swedish newspaper), Volvo, Intrum Justitia, SwedBank and Bonnier. There are also costumers that come from the government companies and various counties in Sweden.
The biggest competition is what they call “the big four”, which basically are HP, IBM, CA and BCM. When the products from the big companies takes a very long time to implement, Op5 clams that they can implement the products under one week. The reason for this, says Jan Josephson at Op5, is because Swedish companies are much smaller than the American and thus their products suits them perfectly.
- We see several cases where the costumers have bought the wrong system from start, thus invested way too much in these types of solution, he continues.
- In some cases it’s almost as you’d buy a 18 wheeler to go to you’re local store for some groceries. The costumers have to get better in questioning the costs for these types of solutions, he continues.
- But can you create trust at the costumer’s side when you say that you can deliver and implement a solution in a couple of days, when you also claim that it takes several months with competitive solutions?
- Sure, we prove this fact with some implementations we performed in the past. Then you have to take the size of the company in your calculations too. Big American companies have thousands of employees, and to role out a system for system monitoring in a period of a couple of months is considered as a fast project. Here in Sweden it’s different where the companies instead have a couple of hundred employees.
- So you don’t see any skepticism from the costumers when you deliver solutions based on open source?
- No, not at all. It’s almost the opposite, costumers demand open source systems. They don’t care as much if the code released under GPL or some other license but rather that the source code is available is a have-to today.
- The code you provide to these products. Do you contribute back the modifications back to the community for open source?
- Yeah, of course we do that. Op5 is for example the largest contributor to open source in several of the projects they use. This week a couple of guys just returned from a open source conference in Germany, says Jan.
- It’s just the fact that the code is made available for everyone that is the benefit to our costumers. When we do an update out at one of our costumers, we perform the same update at the same time at all of our other costumers. The business model when it comes to proprietary programs is most time totally different. There doing the same Job 30 times and charging for the process 30 times would be normal. By using open source we create something fast and cheap which can compete with they big companies like IMB and BA, Jan continues.
- The product you deliver. Could you compare it to Microsoft’s Operations Manager (MOM)=
- Hrmm, I assume that in a PowerPoint-slide you’d put these products beside each other. But now is the fact that Microsoft’s products are good at monitoring Microsoft’s products. In the products we deliver we monitor a bunch of infrastructures like other servers, clients, routers, switches and present everything on just one and the same monitor, replies Jan.
-It’s important to make sure that the entirety in the systems and figure out what the base problem is. That’s why it’s important to have one whole sight over the system. For example if the mails stop functioning, most usually run down to the mail server to check what the problem is. But in nine cases out of ten the mail server isn’t the problem but something along the line. It can be a switch or a router.
- How does the future look like? Do you plan to expand?
- Yes, we are very happy over how well it all went. It has beaten all expectations. We have over 200 system running today. Germany is rolling and we plan to expand towards Norway, Finland. There is a huge demand after services like these today. Although they say that everything becomes more and more stable we still find more errors than we ever did. It doesn’t pass a day without you reading or hearing about a company having problems with buggy vending machines, routers or systems that went down. You know best how you react when the computer won’t start.
Demoproducts are available for testing and valuation on op5’s site and you run them in Vmware Workstation or VMware Player.
site: Op5
Source: linuxworld.idg.se
[…] Read the rest of this great post here […]
newspaper » Swedish Op5 fights IBM and HP with open source
October 18th, 2007