The first training courses for 2012 have been scheduled. We’ll be holding classes at the OpenNMS Headquarters in lovely, metropolitan Pittsboro, NC the last week in February, and we’ll have a class in the United Kingdom at the University of Southampton the last week in March.
Registration is now open. Hope to see you there.
Yesterday we received a PO from Ireland, which is the 25th country in which we have commercial customers.
It’s pretty exciting, although being a huge fan of Guinness I am upset that I don’t get to go.
The other countries are, in no particular order:
Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Israel, Denmark, France, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, the UK, Italy, Trinidad, Malta, India, Honduras, Chile, Sweden, the UAE and the US.
The first OpenNMS commercial support customer was Children’s Hospitals in Minnesota, who purchased a support contract for OpenNMS 0.8 in December of 2001.
They just renewed for a tenth consecutive year.
While we do occasionally lose customers, it is very exciting for us to have earned the trust of a customer for a decade. I’m hoping to add many more as time goes on.
Just wanted to post a note that Dr. Craig Gallen and myself will be at the TM Forum Management World conference in Orlando this week.
The TM Forum organizes proof of concept demonstrations called “catalysts”. We are participating in one with the auspicious name of “Alarm Management for Converged Networks”. For several years now we have been supporting the development of standardized management interfaces, and this catalyst will demonstrate one for dealing with alarms across large, diverse networks.
The main sponsors are Deutsche Telecom, T-Mobile, Vodafone and D2 GmbH. We are participating along with Comarch, HP, and Netage Solutions to demonstrate an implementation of the new interfaces.
Drop me a note if you happen to be at the conference, and I hope to see you there.
This morning I went to the bank and paid off a rather large loan.
A little over two years ago David and myself put our houses on the line to borrow enough money to purchase the OpenNMS version 1.0 copyright from Raritan. We did this for a number of reasons, not the least of which was to insure that we never got into another situation like the one with Cittio.
It was scary, since both my personal and business philosophy is strongly against debt, but we figured the benefits outweighed the risks. The loan was a three year note, and we paid it off early, which I guess says something positive about the current financial health of the company.
Anyway, I’m in a great mood and felt like sharing, and I wanted to poke a little fun at the naysayers who think you can’t make money in open source.
Just a quick note that we are delighted to be able to schedule our week-long OpenNMS training course for London, the week of 28 November.
https://www.adventuresinoss.com/training
Our host is the Girl Guiding Association, the UK version of Girl Scouts founded by Robert Baden-Powell, and also an OpenNMS user. The room we will be using for training is smaller than the one we had in Reading earlier this year, so space is limited. Hope to see you there.
I saw this study (PDF) on Slashdot today talking about how 147 companies control 40% or more of the global economy.
On page 33 there is a list of the top 50, and I was pleasantly surprised to see three of the Top 25 were OpenNMS commercial support customers.
So, if you want to rule the world, use OpenNMS.
We’re very excited to be able to announce that Juniper Networks has licensed OpenNMS through the “Powered by OpenNMS” program to bring Fault and Performance Management to their Junos Space management application.
The full press release is now online. We met with them at Dev-Jam this year in Minnesota, and things progressed rapidly from there. The fact that a company with such a solid reputation as Juniper would choose to make OpenNMS part of its product suite should go a long way to validating the work we’ve done with the project, and I look forward to working with them for years to come.
One of the favorite parts of my job is OpenNMS training. OpenNMS is a large, complex and powerful system (which is why I refer to it as a “network management application platform” instead of just an application) and it is difficult for someone new to easily get involved with it.
Perhaps you can imagine how much fun it is to watch interested people start out on Day One of our training course finally understanding the basics and end up on Day Five going “wow – OpenNMS can do a crazy amount of things”.
It’s a rite of passage and it can be a bit intense. So much so that at the end of the week I sometimes feel like I’m dealing less with a student and more with a brother.
This is stronger during our remote training courses. Uwe Bergmann, CEO of our German partner Nethinks, set up training this week at his office in Fulda. This allowed me to go out with the class in the evenings. Usually when I teach I have others things demanding my attention, but when I am overseas it is too much fun to pass up.
Last night we all went out to a local brewery in Fulda called the Wiesenmühle. They had an amazing “Swartz Bier” called “Dunkel” and after a few of those it is hard to say no to a shot of schnapps.
OpenNMS has turned a number of strangers into my friends, but I am more excited about seeing friendships evolve between members of the community.
At this year’s Dev Jam, Craig Miskell brought a stuffed Kiwi toy from New Zealand. He gave it to Ronny and Markus from Germany, and now “Ulf” is extremely well traveled – going wherever OpenNMS takes him.
I’m not sure what Ulf was up to last night, but on the left is a card from the Toro Negro Rodizio restaurant where we ate on Monday night, and the one on the right is a card for Stefan Junger, one of our students, featuring his photography website (may not be safe for work).
I can’t explain all the cash.
While not every student comes up to us afterward and says “this is the best training I have ever had”, a surprisingly large number do. It is rare that we do better than break even with training, but the long term relationships (and often future support customers) more than make up for it.
Our next training is scheduled for December. Perhaps I’ll see you there.
It was ten years ago today that I first drove to the Oculan offices in Raleigh as an employee, and began working on the OpenNMS Project.
Oculan built a network management appliance on top of OpenNMS, and that was their main business. However, there was enough interest in the OpenNMS platform by itself that I was brought on board to build a service and support business around it.
I worked on that until May of 2002, when Oculan decided to focus solely on their appliance business, as well as to stop working on OpenNMS. I saw enough potential in the project to ask to take it over. Thus I became the sole maintainer of OpenNMS and started my own business called Sortova Consulting Company (named after Sortova Farm, where I live).
Somehow, I managed to keep the project alive as well as pay my mortgage. I owe no small part of that to a group of strangers that formed the inaugural class of the Order of the Green Polo (OGP). Although we had not met (yet), through IRC and the mailing lists they keep me going, if not the project itself.
In 2003 the business grew to the point where my satellite internet connection just wasn’t adequate. It was the only affordable option I had at the farm for any form of non-dialup internet, and since a T1 circuit with internet connectivity was going to run me close to $1000 a month, I decided it would be cheaper to rent an office in town and just get DSL.
I did that, but then I needed to get a new ISP (since I couldn’t afford both the office and to keep my satellite connection at home). Always wanting to “buy local”, I called up the local internet provider called Blast, and opened an account. While I was on the phone I asked about their monitoring solution, and was told I needed to “talk to Lyle”.
Lyle Estill is one of more animated and driven people I’ve ever met, and we hit it off. Since Blast was mainly a services company, he suggested that I bring OpenNMS and come work for him. So for the first time in over a year I ended up with a salary, as well as other people to help share the work around the .com side of the OpenNMS Project.
Through Blast I was able to hire David Hustace, and shortly after that, Matt Brozowski. We now had a real team of people working full time on the project, and things were looking up.
In 2004 Lyle decided to focus his time on a (then) nascent biofuels project. Before he left Blast, the three of us approached him about buying back the OpenNMS business, which we did to form The OpenNMS Group. That has been my current employer since September 1st, 2004.
We had reached the profitability tipping point, and have been organically growing ever since.
Working on OpenNMS has put me in touch with some amazing people. First there are my coworkers, who have been there through the best of times and the worst of times. Second are the people involved in the project itself, mainly through the OGP, but also the people I’ve met through the mailing lists and at conferences. Third are my customers. My job would be a lot harder without such a wonderful group of clients. They not only understand the value of OpenNMS, their input has had a direct impact on the development of the code. I’d be a poor businessman if I ignored the needs of the very people willing to pay me to build it.
Finally, I’ve gotten to travel the world. As a farmboy in a rural section of North Carolina, I’ve been to places like Singapore, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Italy, the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Dubai, Portugal, and Mexico. I’ve been all over the US, including Alaska and Hawaii, and what I’ve found is that while the politics of our respective countries may differ greatly, people all over the world who love open source software are pretty much the same: bright, eager people who really enjoy having control over their software solutions.
Oh, I did I mention really good looking? Serious model potential here, yessiree.
This day did not come without some sad notes. I was looking forward to celebrating at the Ohio LinuxFest, with a number of those good people I mentioned above. Unfortunately, my usually illness free body betrayed me on Thursday, and with chest pains and a high fever I decided it was best not to travel. Things are better today and I should be fine, but it is still disappointing not to be there. Instead, I spent the morning watching David, my spouse and several of her coworkers in the Trooper Challenge Mud Run. It was a fun time, though not nearly as fun for me as the OLF. Oh, David finished 19th and plans to run the New York Marathon this year. He’s doing it for charity so if any of the three people reading this want to sponsor him, drop me a note.
Also today, Rackspace decommissioned server1.opennms.org. Rackspace Hosting is an awesome company and they have been both a client and a supporter of OpenNMS since 2002. When I started out on my own, they donated a server to the project, and it has hosted our mailing lists, website, FTP services, etc. over the years.
It was in their old datacenter in downtown San Antonio which is being closed, so they migrated us to a much newer and powerful machine out of Dallas. Still, it was like losing an old friend.
But on net, the number of friends I’ve gained in the last decade far outweighs that one loss. I am truly blessed to be able to make a living doing something I love, surrounded by awesome people who share similar goals.
Thank you.