Forwarded to the list... -----Burton
-----Original Message----- From: Salvatore Cimmino [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 3:58 PM To: Burton M. Strauss III Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Ntop] Possible GPL infrigment!! Burton, first off let me thank you for copying us on your response. The tone of it was levelheaded and not jumping to conclusions. Much appreciated! Our business is to provide a Managed monitoring service, that is, we do the actual systems surveillance, and we provide the customer with reports, alerts, recommendations, etc. 90% of it is based on tools developed in house, hence, your quick search on me rightly indicates that we did quite a bit of internal development. We do try, when it makes sense, to integrate third party software. Sometimes we buy commercial tools and we use them on equipment at the customer site, to provide some features that is not cost effective to develop ourselves. We do look, of course, at open source software. We have rarely found anything that can easily be incorporated in our service model. Quite a while ago, MRTG was used at one customer, and that fact was well known by the customer in the production environment. When we present our offer to the customer, we do not show what tools we use to perform the necessary tasks. What we want the prospect to realize is the value of the service model that we provide. The particular tools we use at a particular customer may change with the evolution of their IT infrastructure. So we remove the emphasis from the product and put it on the task of managing the network. nTop looks promising, so we decided that it could, possibly, be integrated in our offer. At the moment we are presenting to several customers the type of information that nTop can supply, and trying to figure out if there is interest and if a customer would be willing to pay for such a service (integrated in the other stuff we do). Now, due to the nature of our business model, we don't necessarily want to show DURING THE INITIAL DEMO, what kind of programs we use; we remove references to the actual manufacturer, until the customer is convinced that the OVERALL service offer is answering its needs. If everything goes well, and nTop becomes integrated in our service offer, then we can look at ways to contribute to the nTop development! As of today, one of the key feature that we really need to review, to be able to consider nTop, is the SQL Database integration and advanced reporting based on historical data. Of course we will share our concerns with the nTop community at that time, for the benefit of all. We are tentatively naming the offer based on nTop : nMon. Not much of a disguise, huh ? (I just realized that IBM has a tool called like that for AIX, I did not know that.) Again, what we are selling is the expertise to monitor IT systems, once the customer understands that, than we can safely tell them what kind of tools we use. I hope I find you in agreement that it is not our role to push any particular Open Source software just for the sake of it. On a lighter note, and being Italian myself, I would love to show off what a fellow countryman has achieved. I would definitely appreciate your comments, and, as you mentioned, feel free to post this on the mailing list. Thank you again. Regards Salvatore Cimmino CLARIDION Inc. - IT Systems Management http://www.claridion.com P.S. I am having some difficulties to subscribe to the mailing list. My confirmation reply kept coming back.... P.P.S. Usually responses to newsgroups messages are placed at the bottom. I am not breaking any Netiquette, I hope ? _______________________________________________ Ntop mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://listgateway.unipi.it/mailman/listinfo/ntop
