Thomas Stocking

Co-Founder and Sr. Director of Support and Training

Thomas Stocking believes there's nothing that open source can't do — as long as it's used with appropriate processes and people building a solid foundation. His passion for delivering a solution meeting ITIL standards has made him a very strong support and training programs leader at GroundWork Open Source.

When Thomas founded GroundWork in 2004, he noticed that monitoring tools weren't enough to deliver effective results. The market was flooded with over-priced proprietary solutions, and some deployments lacked the right combination of processes and people to effectively manage their IT. Thomas was also impressed with how approachable and mature open source IT Management projects were, and saw that all they needed was a bit of usability and packaging improvements to competently replace problematic, proprietary solutions.

Over the last 5 years, Thomas has lead the open source commercialization and packaging for GroundWork Open Source by starting or managing key initiatives. Regarded as GroundWork's "Technical Ganesh," Thomas built the first of GroundWork's installable open source software bundles, and created the "profile" concept that packaged ITIL monitoring best practices for specific devices. Later on, Thomas' team lead strong customer and open source project relationships and delivered training materials meeting ITIL standards. Now, GroundWork's training efforts include programs in support of other open source projects.

Previous to GroundWork, Thomas has worked in IT for over 20 years. He has held several management and contributor roles for companies like SiteROCK, University of California, San Francisco Medical Center and Scientific Optical Labs of Australia. Thomas often speaks about ITIL and open source topics at developer conferences such as LinuxWorld, OSCON, SCALE and LISA.

Thomas attained his BA in Applied Math at UC Berkeley and is ITIL Foundation Certified.

Home Town: Berkeley, CA
Hobbies: Perl, RRDTool, music and sailing

Contact Information

Email: tstocking at groundworkopensource dot com