Open source monitoring to take a leap forward at Interop

When Interop opens in Las Vegas on May 1, open source will take another leap forward.

The famous InteropNet, an annual project showing a variety of the largest telecomm industry vendors working together to build something that scales to 40,000 attendees, will be monitored by an open source company.

Groundwork Open Source of San Francisco will put its Groundwork Monitor right against the offerings of such firms as Computer Associates, on a network with over 20 vendors, a 10 gigabit backbone, and a host of applications.

"We were invited as much to prove open source could monitor large scale networks as anyone else," said Tony Barbagallo, VP of Product Management and Marketing. "CA has been the monitor for 7-8 years. It was a thrill for us to be next to them."

Groundwork is only a few years old, Barbagallo said, but it already has about 135 paying customers, most in the mid-market. The Interop network gives them a chance to "move up the food chain," as the marketers say.

And here's the pitch.

"We built this foundation layer that took multiple data streams from various open source monitoring tools, normalized the data, stuck it in a database, then built an AJAX frame on top so you could present it and configure it with graphical tools. That’s been our approach. That’s what has taken off."

Interop is one small step for Groundwork, but one giant leap for open source. We're playing with the big boys now, and we're here to win.