Sep 4, 2009 11:51 AM
Zenoss and the Competition
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By the time stone crab comes out the whole interface will be revamped. Also, if there's a feature that you really need which is not available you can always pay Zenoss Inc. for some PS work and have them design you whatever you wish. Comparing one product to another and asking why it doesn't have this or that feature which is in the other product isn't really an effective form of criticism. I'm sure that Zenoss has features which Hyperic doesn't have and vice-versa.
There are 5 developers and 2 support developers working on the entire Zenoss project. I would consider a rotating graphs portlet as a "nice to have" feature, rather than something critical. There are many bugs that need to be addressed in upcoming versions, and only so many developers working on resolving them all. Combine that with a goal of redesigning the whole interface (see a preview here: http://public-demo.zenoss.com/evconsole) by the time that Stone Crab rolls around, and I'd say that they have their plates pretty full.
Managers always tend to be more concerned with having an abundance of pretty pictures available to display stats, rather than with the actual back-end functionality of any given monitoring system.
You know, of course, that I have multiple reasons for things out. With both Hyperic and Zenoss being open source based projects, cross-pollination is a good thing, I think both projects can prosper with a little judicious copying. Of course, mostly, I just want my boss to stop threatening me with a forced migration to Solarwinds.
However, it can't help but cross my mind that if Zenoss would like some more money to hire a few more developers, maybe they should consider having a somewhat cheaper support package. The minimum $25,000 (yearly) buy in for support prevents my company from paying for support. The price jump from free to paid support is simply too big (and we're too small to have that kind of money just lying around). Of course, I understand something substanciallly cheaper might cut into the sales of the higher priced plans, but I wonder if Zenoss provided a plan with just 8x5 email support or even just access to Zenoss Enterprise features at a fraction of the cost (for example ~$2,500/year) if Zenoss wouldn't gather a lot of money from smaller businesses. But, hey it's not my business.
By the way is there a place that explains what the rates are for PS work?
I started a thread yesterday to discuss "support" for Core customers on the "Support and Services Partners" group - thread/11396?tstart=0 .I know the problems of providing particularly "defect support" - it's potentially a very open committment, but I think there are lots of folk out there who can't pay the minimum $25K for Enterprise.
Have a look at my thoughts and lets have a debate about it.
Cheers,
Jane
I generally think that it would be nice to have some cheaper support
options. I don't know how it should work out, but I'd be interested in
what support providers feel they could do for what price. I could
definitely see a market for Zenpack creation, but I don't know the
price. The other thing that I could see is defect fixes, but probably
most of it would be coding, so it'd work out something like a
specialized elance or some such.
--
James Pulver
Information Technology Area Supervisor
LEPP Computer Group
Cornell University
jcurry wrote, On 9/16/2009 3:26 PM:
I started a thread yesterday to discuss "support" for Core customers on the "Support and Services Partners" group - thread/11396?tstart=0 (thread/11396) .I know the problems of providing particularly "defect support" - it's potentially a very open committment, but I think there are lots of folk out there who can't pay the minimum $25K for Enterprise.
Have a look at my thoughts and lets have a debate about it.
Cheers,
Jane
>
You bring up a pretty valid point. Zenoss Inc. as of right now is not offering any lower priced packages and truth be told we have a ton of work. The idea for the Partners community is to allow people who do have the bandwidth and the expertise to provide services and support on the lower end (or the higher end if they so chose . This is pretty consistent with what Red Hat and other vendors do. Also if these partners get active in the community, like Jane, can show off their skills and talents and hopefully through their community credibility make it easy for some folks to decide which partner can help them best. I would hope over the course of the next year we add a ton of Zenoss partners that can provide training, ZenPack development and even hosted instances of Zenoss. That also begs the question of whether we resell Zenoss Enteprise ZenPacks individually. That's an option which we will continue to evaluate. The tough thing is that when you are a little company you can only bite off so many initiatives that doesn't mean we won't add more offerings and options as we grow
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