Open Source Monitoring: GroundWork on Sale? Not Really
GroundWork, the provider of the open source based network management software, today announced the availability of GroundWork Monitor Starter Edition, designed for small deployments up to 250 monitored devices.
David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, in March told me that GroundWork “productized” a cheaper ‘stealth’ product that was sold by their partners only, prior to this launch. The Starter Edition has now gained an official state, apparently answering to community edition users’ needs.
Is open source on sale? is Groundwork trying to upsell its community?
Roberto Galoppini, and 1 other are discussing. 
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Hi Roberto,
Thanks for the write-up. As usual, you raise interesting ‘big picture’ questions.
One small point of clarification: Starter Edition and Professional are completely identical from a feature set point of view (including basic auto discovery), the only differences being in the areas of number of devices, support mechanism, and automatic upgrade assurance to future versions. So while they completely overlap from a feature point of view, they do not overlap from a target market perspective.
One other additional note: Starter Edition users can receive credit for their purchase should they choose to upgrade to 6.0 Enterprise when it is released.
From a bigger point of view:
The question we had when we made Starter Edition was ‘What changes can we make to an enterprise product to make it practical to sell at a lower price point?’
Interestingly, in this case the answer had nothing to do with the code; the code is the same as GroundWork Monitor 5.3. Actually, keeping the code the same as Professional also helps keep the costs low.
The areas where we removed costs were:
1. How it is sold, selling it online only.
2. How it is supported, also online only.
3. How big the deployment can be, as this also affects the support costs.
Cheers!