All the great commercial open source companies are in attendance here in Portland.  I had the chance to catch up with Mark Hinkle from Zenoss to hear about their latest 3.0 release which was just announced before this weeks event, and how they are bringing their open source monitoring solution to the proprietary Cisco UCS stack.

Zenoss is relatively old when it comes to commercial open source application vendors.  The movement which was kicked off in 2004, quickly had Zenoss following suit in 2006 bringing their open source monitoring platform to the masses.  The organization and community has grown by leaps and bounds over the past four years, and with that growth their monitoring platform has followed along, and its latest 3.0 might be some of the biggest additions which will bring Zenoss into the enterprise cloud era.

Besides introducing some new user interface elements, 3.0 has a big focus on the virtualization and cloud computing space.  Between in-house development and great community support, 3.0 extends the platform’s VM monitoring capabilities around VMWare ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, and Redhat’s LibVirt.  On the virtualization/cloud front, they have also introduced deeper integration/monitoring into Amazon’s EC2 platform leveraging the CloudWatch API.

When it comes to commercial open source in Zenoss’s world its not just all about working with other open source apps/solutions.  They realize that there is a HUGE opportunity in the enterprise with the transformation underway that virtualization and cloud are forcing.  As part of this movement and realization Zenoss added support for Cisco’s new UCS stack solution.

Cisco decided to target more then just the router/switch market and began to compete with former partner HP with the intro of UCS.  Out of the gates UCS is getting great reviews and great initial traction in both enterprises and service providers.  It is fantastic to see Zenoss react to what’s happening in the proprietary world, and introduce open solutions that play nice and enhance IT’s experience in these areas.

During our conversation it was great to hear Hinkle echo the same belief that Eucalyptus’s Marten Mickos did when speaking about the IaaS sector in that things are just getting started.  The IT market is so gigantic, and there is such a fundamental shift underway, that the world for monitoring solution adoption is wide open.  Its a fantastic mindset to have for a company, especially that of an commercial open source vendor.

A lot of times companies can get bogged down in competition and worrying about what others are doing, when they should be focusing 100% of their energy on how to best service their customers and community.., and Zenoss embodies this fully.