Hi,
My transition to working on the project full time means that the future
of the project is tied to my ability to support myself (and hopefully
others) using it.
As I noted before, there is no plan to change the availability of the
software under the GPL. That will continue.
Originally, the project was created for monitoring, and we do some
things uniquely well. But the problem with that is that probably 90% of
our potential customers for monitoring already have a solution that we'd
have to displace, and there is a lot of competition among the many OSS
monitoring projects and closed source products. This means that being
able to grow the project the way I think we'd all like will be difficult
if we position it as a monitoring tool first - going head to head with
all those incumbents.
It seems to methat discovery has advantages over monitoring from this
perspective. From what I know, I would guess that no more than about
30% of our potential market for discovery has a product, and there are
very few open source discovery products, the closed source ones are very
expensive, and our advantages over them don't require huge scale to see.
So, I think the way to position the project is as a discovery project
that also does and integrates monitoring incredibly well, rather than a
discovery-driven monitoring project. These two are functionally
equivalent, but mean very different things when we're talking to
potential users or customers. I don't plan on dropping monitoring (I
can't) or making it less capable. The discovery piece tends to fit well
into companies that have auditability needs, and who have serious
security concerns.
I think this is a better way to present both the project and the product.
Hidden in this plan are some "leap of faith" assumptions. I have some
ideas about what these are, but they include at least these:
How many organizations could seriously benefit from discovery?
What % of these organizations don't have a suitable discovery process?
What all products (open and closed) provide a discovery database?
Can we present/sell this as a form of ITIL CMDB?
What other "leap of faith" assumptions do you see in this enterprise -
either because of this decision, or in general?
-- Alan Robertson
[email protected]
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