hyper

Open source a key to software innovation, suggests Nobel Prize research

Stacey at Hyperic has an excellent post parsing research from recent Nobel Prize winners, Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson. Digging into their research, she uncovers the following analog to open source:

...when discoveries are "sequential" (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such protection. Furthermore, an inventor's prospective profit may actually be enhanced by competition and imitation.… Read more

Hyperic: Growing revenue by growing community

I talked with Javier Soltero (CEO of Hyperic) yesterday, and got more than I bargained for in terms of an update. First off, it was great to hear that a number of Alfresco users are managing their systems now using Hyperic.

Even better, it was great to hear that yet another open source company is kicking tail (or was that kicking some Mule?). Hyperic just had a blow-out quarter and closed on a massive deal with a company near and dear to my heart.

One of the most promising aspects of Hyperic right now is the robustness of its community. Stacey Schneider (Senior Director, Marketing, Hyperic) writes:… Read more

'HyperBike': Godzilla on two wheels

If there's a Hummer equivalent for bicycles, this would be it. The aptly named "HyperBike" was ostensibly made by inventor Curtis DeForest because he wanted to "keep up with traffic," but we suspect that he got tired of being pushed around by SUVs and wanted to level the playing field a little.

Regardless of its origins, this human-powered monstrosity is a force to be reckoned with, reaching speeds up to 50 mph on tilted wheels measuring 8 feet high. As SCI FI Tech notes, it's technically not a bicycle because it has a small … Read more

Hyperic managing Alfresco...the power of open source

Yes, this is a bit self-serving, but I was excited when Hyperic started offering management for Zimbra servers, and am doubly so to see them extend this to Alfresco, too.

From the release:… Read more

Growth that sales and marketing money can't buy

I was thinking through the open source diffusion model over the last few days, and put together this slide. It's not groundbreaking by any stretch (Larry Augustin and John Roberts are much more articulate on this point than I am), but it reflects the way open source spreads.

On the open source side, you start with users and then convert them into customers. On the proprietary side, you start with marketing and sales to create customers. No users until they pay.

The key point here is in the difference in focus.… Read more

In the trenches with...Ryan Morgan of Hyperic

This next installment has us "In the trenches with...Ryan Morgan of Hyperic. When I asked Javier for his recommendation on an "unsung hero" at Hyperic he suggested Ryan. I demurred once I heard Ryan's title (Chief Software Architect). But Javier insisted, informing me that Ryan had grown with the company. He wasn't blessed with executive status from Day One, but instead proved himself over time.

Since that's precisely the sort of tenacity that I was looking for in this series, I capitulated. Here's a guy who has done just about everything at Hyperic (including the accounting), and who helped to see the company through its sometimes rough transition from Covalent Technologies to Hyperic. Talk about bootstrapping....

Ryan is particularly interesting because he represents the next (people) wave of open source: developers and business people who have never known anything beyond open source. Ryan's first job was an open source company. I suspect his last will be, too.

Name, company, title, and what you actually do

Ryan Morgan, Co-founder and Chief Software Architect, Hyperic. My primary role at Hyperic is the technical lead for Hyperic's main product, Hyperic HQ. In addition to those responsibilities I frequently engage with Hyperic's larger customers to ensure their HQ deployments are successful. I'm also an active member of Hyperic's online community. Prior to Hyperic raising funding I also managed Hyperic's books, though I think that had more to do with being the son of a CPA than it did my financial skills.… Read more

Hyperic + Zimbra = Easy

Hyperic hasn't been making much noise about it, but it's doing an excellent job of extending its IT management solution to the various open source applications. As it announced today, Zimbra is the latest to get the royal treatment.

From the release:

Beginning today, administrators of Zimbra Collaboration Suite,... have a fully supported, enterprise-ready solution for managing their complex, mission critical environments with the general availability of Hyperic HQ plugin for Zimbra. The plugin made available by Hyperic...will allow Zimbra customers to easily monitor and manage the performance of their open source messaging and collaboration suite along with all other layers of their infrastructure.… Read more

Open source arms dealers

Look around at the rising tide of open source companies, and you'll find some things in common:

Jira for bug and issue tracking; Confluence, SocialText, or some other wiki technology for online documentation; Jive Forums or other forum software of some stripe; Demand generation software ( Loopfuse, Eloqua, or other) Hyperic for network functionality (a la Red Hat Network).

There is other software that open source companies have in common, but these are some of the major commonalities. Most people don't realize just how much money there is in arming the next century of software. Atlassian, for example, is … Read more

The Open Source CEO: Javier Soltero, Hyperic (Part 2)

For the second installment in the Open Source CEO Series, I caught up with Javier Soltero, CEO and Co-founder of Hyperic. Javier is a highly pragmatic open sourceror, fully buying into the open source ethos but not forgetting that customers buy value, not source code.

Name, position, and company of executive Javier A. Soltero, CEO and Co-founder, Hyperic

Year company was founded and year you joined it Hyperic was founded in 2004. Coincidentally, I joined that same year. :-)

Stage of funding and venture firms that have invested Series B (closed 6/07). Investors: Accel Partners & Benchmark Capital

Background prior to current company I was Chief Architect at Covalent in charge of developing products to help manage Apache and its related technology stack (Tomcat, etc.). We built the first version of what later became Hyperic HQ at Covalent in 2003 and prior to that shipped a number of management technologies for Apache/Tomcat including a configuration and provisioning system. Before that, I was senior engineer at Backflip.com (a 5-years-ahead-of-its-time high-profile bookmark sharing/social network founded by ex-Netscape people). It was at Backflip that I had my first brush with the problem of managing a large scale online service business. I also met two of my co-founders (Charles and Doug) while at Backflip. Prior to that, I was at Netscape, helping create the internet infrastructure technologies that most people today take for granted :)… Read more