Open-source systems management firm GroundWork Open Source has opened for business in the UK.

The San Francisco-based firm has launched GroundWork Monitor, its alternative to enterprise frameworks such as IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, CA Unicenter, and BMC Patrol. A little like Red Hat in Linux distributions, GroundWork aggregates open-source tools such as RRDtool, MRTG, SmokePing, NeDi, Cacti, Ganglia, Dojo and Sendpage to provide what it claims is a complete monitoring solution. Customers include online tickets site StubHub, chip designer Cadence, software firm Ariba and the US Marine Corps.

“We’re targeting the ‘M’ in SMB [small and medium-sized businesses],” said Tony Barbagallo, vice-president of product management. Not only is there a licensing cost issue but also there is a complexity issue with these high-end tools.”

GroundWork will seek to recruit resellers and managed service providers to deploy and manage installations.

Some watchers expect that, although often well-entrenched, traditional management tools with licence costs could be displaced by open-source competitors.

“There are parts of systems management such as event monitoring and change management that are mature and ripe to be commoditised and there are opportunities to build things that plug into platforms,” said Jon Collins of analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton. “For network managers, it doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re open-source or not, it’s how you get the spaghetti to work together.”

However, Collins said that “prime integrators” would have a role in orchestrating open-source systems management deployments, and added that the IT giants would continue to be required for large deployments.

Other firms in open-source systems management include Qlusters, which has a platform called OpenQRM that can host a broad range of plug-ins. Like GroundWork, Qlusters aims to manage not just fellow open-source programs but multiplatform hardware and software.

Another newcomer, called FiveRuns, offers an open-source browser-based approach that it says simplifies systems management to only necessary data. Meanwhile, another open-source operations management firm, Hyperic, recently signed an agreement with open-source solutions stack provider Covalent Technologies.

A startup called Centeris is taking a different approach. Founded by former Microsoft executives, Centeris offers Windows-based management tools to control Linux and Windows servers on heterogeneous networks. Centeris makes its core Open Agent technology available under open-source terms.