Open Source at Wall Street: Groundwork gets momentum in the Financial Sector

Groundwork, the provider of the open source based IT management and network monitoring solution, is getting momentum in financial services environments.

Mary Knox of Gartner Research, says that the adoption of OSS is most notable in the financial sector because “they are impacted by escalating transaction volumes and data processing requirements as well as cost pressures”.

I asked David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, to tell me if his experience confirms Mary’s ideas on why adoption is arising in the financial sector.

Earlier this year, GroundWork conducted a survey of the GroundWork Monitor user community, including both users of the free, Community Edition and the subscription-based Professional and Enterprise versions. There were 361 completed surveys, a large enough sample size to be statistically significant.

One of the questions asked was “Please indicate the importance of the following attributes of open source software when evaluating systems management technologies.” In order of ranking, the top answers were:

1. Continuity of technology support over time
2. Access to a wide community of experts
3. Ability to combine OSS tools together more easily
4. Less expensive
5. Higher quality product
6. Easier to customize
7. Avoiding vendor lock-in
8. More secure code
9. Access to the source code
10. Compliance with organizational mandates to use OSS

I agree with Davids saying that the cost savings doesn’t appear to be the most important factor, since commercial and extensive support sounds definitely more interesting to customers (along with integrating different OSS tools together).

How about the percentage of your subscriber base upgrading (nearly 30%)?

While GroundWork does have an increasing number of customers who use GroundWork Monitor Enterprise from the very beginning, the upgrade percentage is a reflection of customers who have moved from either GroundWork Monitor Community Edition or GroundWork Monitor Professional to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. These are deployments that are expanding their use of GroundWork Monitor, looking to add some of the capabilities GroundWork Monitor Enterprise can offer. Namely, support for distributed topologies, standby servers for high availability, or extended network management functions. GroundWork’s largest deployments are now above 10,000 managed servers, split across multiple geographic locations.

Thank you David, I see the increase include also customers upgrading from GroundWork Monitor Professional to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, and not only users becoming customers. Even if you didn’t find yet the philosopher’s stone I believe that running similar surveys can help Groundowork and other open source firms to better understand your market.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Related Posts