Groundwork targets mid-market enterprise

Groundwork is at Interop this week, using its open source monitoring solution on the InteropNet.

The East Coast show is much smaller than those on the West Coast, but that's fine with  Tony Barbagallo, vice president for product marketing and management at Groundwork, because he's targeting mid-sized businesses anyway. (See the whole company's current presentation slides via the Web here.)

"We figure we'll meet the needs of 80% of the base market. The other 20% need OpenView and Tivoli. For the rest of the market which can't afford that price anyway we can meet their needs."

Groundwork is starting to look up-market, toward companies which have a network administrator separate from the system administrator.  The company is offering a "professional systems engagement" with prices starting at about $25,000, where it will install and test software in network devices, integrating them with its solution.

That solution includes well-known open source tools like NeDi, ntop and Cacti, integrated with Groundwork's own Foundation and Guava software, with results displayed graphically. Even at a base subscription price of $16,000 and the professional services, Barbagallo charges a fraction of what commercial offerings do.

Recently, Barbagallo said, Royal Bank of Canada budgeted $1.4 million for a network monitoring solution, which Groundwork delivered for $180,000. Even in Canadian dollars, those are real savings. Downright loonie.

What would be loony would be to not take those savings seriously.