On the Shoulders of Giants

Recently Cote an analyst from Redmonk used the term the “Little 4″ in his blog to describe a new bread of systems management vendors. This group includes Zenoss as well as Groundwork, Hyperic, and Qlusters. The term is used to differentiate our group from the old guard of systems management vendors often called the “Big 4.” This group is made up of BMC, CA, HP, and IBM. The Big 4 have been in the systems management space for many years and all are multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies. How could it ever be possible for this Little 4 to compete or even get noticed in such a mature market space? Why would venture capitalists invest in such an effort? Are we insane? The answers are more clear then they might seem at first glance.

First, because this is a mature space, the Little 4 don’t have to relearn lessons that were costly for the Big 4. Things like feature importance, architecture, and implementation strategies have been hard won battles for the Big 4. Not only can the Little 4 learn from their experience, we are unencumbered by legacy implementations.

Second, there exists a large gap in features and cost between the Big 4 and existing low end solutions. This has left lots of space in which the Little 4 can operate. One of our biggest innovations may be our feature set to cost ratio. We will bring the power of a Big 4 implementation to a small to mid sized business, a space where the Big 4 have had a hard time penetrating.

Third, and maybe most significant, the Little 4 are all commercial open source companies. We leverage the power of community and open development practices to provide improved code quality, adherence to standards, no vendor lock in, and most importantly community development. When I say community development, I mean that our software is written by more then just the Zenoss team. We leverage many sub projects and libraries to provide a powerful solution with relatively few developers. For the first four year of Zenoss development, I was the only developer. If people asked how many programmers worked on Zenoss I would always say 100s! As is true with many open source projects, a small number of developers are able to create projects that compete with large proprietary products.

The Little 4, we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness on sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

-EAD