Open Source Systems Management: Hyperic generates Momentum Europe-wide

Hyperic, the provider of open source web infrastructure management software, is receiving growing attention in Europe, as results from an announcement about over seas expansion earlier this year, involving the European partner France’s Dalet Digital Media Systems.

Jeff Santelices, VP of Business Development, gave me an overview about how Hyperic is building their channel and why partners like Dalet are partnering with them.

How about Hyperic’s Europe expansion?

Hyperic’s open source management solution has solicited tremendous interest globally. What we have found is that close to 50% of our download volume is from outside of the US. The download volumes we started to see in Europe – both for our community offering and our enterprise offering – have been substantial. We recognize that in order to serve this community effectively we need to have a more localized approach.

Hyperic is experiencing download interest in Europe, but as matter of fact the “download obsession” is progressively going out of fashion, being actual users and potential customers two not overlapping subsets.

Jeff, what is Hyperic doing to address the European potential market?

From a Hyperic perspective, we have begun making investments to expand our direct presence in Europe. As an example, we recently hired an experienced technical support executive based in the UK – who will support our customers across Europe. And, as Stacey Schneider may have mentioned to you in the past, we have two community managers in Europe – one in Germany and one in Spain.

Does the technical support executive take care of pre-sales?

Our support manager will also help the direct team with pre-sales efforts until we hire further. She will be based in London and will stay focused on our Enterprise customers primarily, providing support as needed during local European business hours, and traveling as needed to support these customers in-person.

Hyperic is strongly focusing on the OEM partner program, a win-win situation where companies having a substantial European or global customer base, can bring in interesting deals. This is just the case with Dalet, which customers needed management capabilities very specific to Dalet’s solutions and the Broadcasting vertical. Going Hyperic helped Dalet to deliver that capability with a fast go-to-market deployment and cost effective implementations.

Even not knowing Hyperic price lists, it is easy to figure out that European IT SMEs are not the perfect partner. In fact the pricing model is driven by the number of servers under management, so the ideal reseller partner has customers with thousands of servers under management.

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