The goal was to offer an cost-effective and efficient way for companies to deploy GWOS Monitor in their environment. We wanted to go beyond the usual “access to the software” and include support and training to really help evaluators and users be successful with our solution.

We’ve learned a lot in the intervening year – in response to customer feedback we rolled out a range of new EQS packaging options based on virtual machines and also introduced a version tailored to Amazon’s EC2 service. All are focused on getting administrators up and running as quickly as possible.

Uptake of Enterprise Quickstart outstripped my wildest expectations. Hundreds of companies from all over the world have used this offering to solve monitoring problems across a wide spectrum of industries. We’ve also seen new uses of GWOS technologies in the cloud, in OEM applications and at service providers that started with an EQS purchase by a curious administrator. Beyond the data center, customers are monitoring ATM machines, cash registers and other devices.

We’ve gathered a huge amount of feedback on the Quickstart program and today are announcing some changes to make it an even more compelling offering:

• The Enterprise Quickstart is now an official member of the GWOS product line-up. Given its success we intend to continue the program on an on-going basis.
• Enterprise Quickstart has been upgraded to Enterprise Edition Release 6.2. The features added in this version are described here. Anyone purchasing EQS after today will receive the new version.
• We’ve lowered the minimum Flex subscription (which includes software upgrades) to $2,000 per year for email support. This makes the full subscription solution with production-grade support accessible to many more companies where small but critical infrastructure requires monitoring.
• We have reduced the number of devices included under the Enterprise Quickstart program from 100 devices to 50 devices. This is to maintain consistency between our EQS and Flex programs and affects less than 15% of customers currently using the EQS program.

We hope that these changes will lead to a wider adoption of GroundWork Monitor and as a result, drive more efficient IT operations for a wider range of companies.

Full details of the revamped Enterprise Quickstart can be found here and in our FAQ.

• Visualization of monitoring information through different lenses - physical topology, business process and logical flow. Our partners have been very active building solutions in this area and we’re working to include their expertise to improve Monitor Enterprise.
• Different Configuration use-cases. The current Monarch configuration tool is a very popular component of GroundWork Monitor but it is far from perfect. We’re looking at ways Monarch can be made easier to use. In addition we’re taking a step back to look at new approaches to configuration that account for different types of users including less-experienced administrators and people coming from other tools who aren’t steeped in the history, tradition and conventions of tools such as Nagios Core, RRDtool, Cacti and SNMPtt.

These initiatives will be the basis of our Enterprise Edition 6.3 and 6.4 releases respectively. From a time-line perspective we’re targeting 90-120 days between releases to balance our quality, stability and feature development goals.

Connectors and integrations for GroundWork Monitor are another area we’re expanding with the help of some great technology partners. If you haven’t already done so we’d love to hear your thoughts on incident management and ticketing over at this short, one-page survey.

As always your questions and comments are appreciated to sbennett (at) gwos (dot) com.

You can help guide GWOS in our product roadmap and partnering strategy by completing a one-page, 9-question survey.

We appreciate your help!

I can’t say for sure which marketing campaigns will work and which won’t. Certainly, we swung big with our first-ever Wall Street Journal ad. But we are swinging big in a lot of ways these days - and the results are quite positive.

• In June, we announced that our customer base has quadrupled in the last eight months.
• On July 8, we launched V6.2, with special features for service providers and a new service from Neustar Webmetrics that allows our customers to view their internal and external monitoring side-by-side from a single console.
• In another recent partnership, we’ve added Cloud Connector for Eucalyptus, which combines application and cloud health monitoring for Eucalyptus and UEC-based private clouds. It combines monitoring of private clouds and internal datacenters.
• We’ve also launched a series of innovative marketing campaigns, including a program to offer free industry certifications to our new customers.
• Meanwhile, we are still making GroundWork Monitor Community edition available for free for the community. We’re up to V6.0 now with more updates planned soon.

And we’re not finished by a long shot. Watch this space!

Last week the team released an advanced Enterprise solution targeted to companies who are service providers or who are managing complex web application and java environments.  Simon Bennett hosted an introduction to 6.2 webcast that had hundreds of participants!

More information about 6.2 here: http://www.groundworkopensource.com/products/whats-new-6.2.html

For Enterprise Quickstart (EQS) customers who are getting a jumpstart on monitoring before their summer vacation time kicks in… we are offering a sweepstakes program that qualifies new customers the chance to get up to $4500 in reimbursement for attaining an IT certification from organizations like RedHat, Oracle, Eucalyptus, Novell, Ubuntu, Linux Foundation and more.

Interested in getting IT Education funds and time to actually complete a course?  Start by purchasing EQS for $49.  More on the sweepstakes rules and regulations here.

This product was launched as a beta a few months ago and proved itself with the early adoptors.

“By adding application and host monitoring to cloud computing management, Persistent Systems has a better understanding of the services in which the private cloud renders,” said Girish Katdare, senior project manager, cloud and SaaS competency, Persistent Systems Ltd. “GWOS Cloud Connector allowed us to expand our existing Eucalyptus cloud offering, enabling us to utilize our high end resources more efficiently and ensuring that our managed services customers will ultimately have better service.”

Read more about the Cloud Connector here:

http://www.groundworkopensource.com/products/cloud.html

GWOS quadruples customer base in eight months, seeing a rise in customers who are switching from HP Operations, BMC Patrol, IBM Tivoli and CA Unicenter.

The new GWOS customers switching from these expensive monitoring tools have saved over $1,200,000 this year alone in annual maintenance fees.  GWOS is glad to be re-allocating IT funds into more productive and innovative areas in IT.

Some common use-cases we’re seeing for the private cloud approach to infrastructure:

• Horizontally scaling, primarily of Web-based applications. Using variations of the LAMP or Ruby stacks these appear to be sites and portals engineered for horizontal scaling via HTTP load-balancing and loosely coupled application components.
• Specialized cluster-aware applications. A mixture of HPC, MPI, and Hadoop-based applications usually with an emphasis on research or batch processing.
• Traditional Enterprise applications – collaboration, file serving, directory services, primarily being delivered by Managed Service Providers.

Our engineers, in conjunction with the incredible Eucalyptus team are busy tackling many of the Hard Problems associated with hybrid and dynamic infrastructure but we’re looking for a few customers and users to provide direct feedback on what they’d like to see from the MEC product. We’re looking for early adopters of private clouds to participate in an MEC beta program to shape the future of application monitoring in dynamic envrionments.

We’re accepting sign-ups now, to learn more and to complete the beta program application, check out the MEC product page.

Last month, we announced support for Enterprise Server (excluding NMS add-ons) running on Ubuntu, and this month we package it up so that you have a stable, ready-to-go package that can get Enterprise Edition 6.1.1 up and running in under 10 minutes.

The Enterprise Quickstart Ubuntu powered appliance costs $59 for a year.  It includes Enterprise 6.1.1 and coverage for any 100 devices on your network.  The $59 also gets you a four hour, self-paced, online training class which will help with any configuration questions you may have.  It also comes with 60 days of unlimited email support after completing the training class.

Buy Enterprise Quickstart Ubuntu powered appliance for $59 now.

• Status viewer page load times greatly improved. Our testing team claims navigating around the status viewer is 25-30% faster than 6.1 - feels a lot quicker than that to me.
• New status viewer tab behaviour - whizzing around Status Viewer means more tabs get opened. There’s now is now a button to clean them all up with a single-click.
• A significant problem with the availability reports was reported and addressed in this release. Highly recommended for our advanced reports mavens.

As always the complete list of changes (over 75) are included in the release notes. Don’t forget updates and new releases are included in our Flex subscriptions, something to think about if you’re considering paying someone else to upgrade to their next version?