What are the signs that a systems management company is going out of business?

a) they abandon their open source project, which was supposedly tied to their commercially supported version

b) they switch CEOs very very quietly

c) they are an “open source” company trying to actually make money (via paying customers, not VC)

d) all of the above

Amazingly, Qlusters blew through $34 million of capital, the last $10 million just in the past year. If you remember, these are the guys who were first proprietary software, then decided to go open source, then tried to figure out a revenue model off of open source plus relaunched proprietary software. Phew. In the same year (2006), they said they didn’t compete with the Big 4, just integrated with them, and then said they in fact did compete with the Big 4. Very confusing externally – wonder what it was like internally…

Does Qlusters going out of business put more pressure on the other open source systems management players to prove they can actually make it as a business? To prove that their business model can actually make money? To prove to their VCs that there will be a return on all those millions that were invested?

Can someone tell the Open Management Consortium?

Actually, now I’m wondering why this hasn’t been reported more in the media. Just called the company main line and support line and got recordings to leave a message. Hmm. When do you know that a company is officially dead??

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Five years in the making, Hyper-V finally ships. Is Microsoft late to the game? Yes, but how much does that really matter? At the recent Gartner infrastructure management conference, an informal poll of the audience showed that something like a third of the room predicted they’d be using multiple virtualization platforms, including Hyper-V and the installed winner, VMware. But wait, Microsoft’s suite of virtualization management tools, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), is sill in beta. Stay tuned.

Accepting the Sun virtualization challenge, Microsoft group product manager, Patrick O’Rourke weighs in on how “Hyper-V can compete with the open source Xen-based alternatives and whether a Windows-only virtualization technology can hack it in today’s increasingly heterogeneous datacenters.” (I just like the title of the blog post…”Virtualization wars: The empire strikes back”)

GroundWork Open Source says (again) it is moving up and playing with the big guys. Here’s an interview with David Lily, founder and CEO. Hmm. What happened to CEO Ranga Rangachari? As far as I can tell, he disappeared somewhere between Nov 2007 and Jan 2008. No announcement that I could find… Wonder how things are going for GroundWork? Are they about to follow QLusters and drop the “Open Source” part of their name that they tacked on a couple years back?

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