CEO of dissolved Open Country buys management code, launches Linux, VM provisioning company

Open Country, once a rising star in the open source management software market, closed doors in 2007. But its former CEO, Laurent Gharda, isn't giving up on its software.

Gharda acquired the intellectual property rights to Open Country's core assets including its provisioning software and today launched a company called LinMin that focuses on affordable bare metal provisioning of Linux systems and virtual machines.

The CEO announced availability of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning (LBMP), the fifth generation of Open Country's provisioning software whose installation and operation -- once complex -- has been dramatically simplified. Installation takes only minutes and operation of the software is much simplified, he said. The product supports most versions of Linux and includes pre-release code that supports provisioning of Windows server products used in mixed Linux and Windows networks.

Open County tried to make it big selling management and monitoring software but the market was too crowded and commoditized, he said. By focusing on provisioning software, which is complementary to more full fledged management platforms, LinMin can take on high cost provisioning providers such as Red Hat Network for a fraction of the cost, and take on cobbled together open source solutions that are time consuming to build and costly to implement.

Gharda claims that a corporate provisioning solution costs anywhere from $10K to $200,000, while an annual subscription to his company's LBMP costs $100 for 10 client systems, $400 for 100 client systems and $750 for 250 clients systems. Perpetual licenses are also available. To lower costs, LinMin has no direct sales force and is purchased directly from the Internet.