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Press Release

Zenoss Releases 2010 Open Source Systems Management Survey Report

Reveals flexibility, not cost, drives open source systems management adoption

2010/08/11

LINUXCON, Boston, Mass - August 11, 2010 - Zenoss Inc., the corporate sponsor of Zenoss Core, today announced the release of the 2010 Open Source Systems Management Survey. Based on more than 950 completed surveys gathered at the USENIX Large Installation System Administration conference each year from 2006 and 2009 and within the Zenoss open source systems management community from 2007 through 2009, the survey’s purpose was to determine usage patterns for systems management software and particularly the usage of open source software to solve IT management needs of large organizations.

“What’s telling about this survey is that that flexibility, followed by lower costs, is the main driver for open source systems management adoption today,” said Mark Hinkle, VP Community at Zenoss. “Users indicated that the collaborative, transparent and free traits of open source management tools enabled agility and provide numerous other advantages which result in a high degree of satisfaction with the tools as evidenced in the survey responses.”

Additional key findings in the 2010 Open Source Systems Management Survey include:

  • 98% of the survey respondents indicated usage of open source in their enterprises.
  • 71% of 2009 respondents indicated that open source software was easier to deploy up from 48% in 2008, 38% in 2007 and 26% in 2006.
  • When asked their degree of satisfaction with open source software on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 indicating most satisfied) users indicated an average level of satisfaction between 7 and 8.
  • 76% of system administrators in large enterprises indicate they prefer to use open source whenever possible.
  • The number one reason for not choosing open source solutions was lack of support followed by poor documentation.
  • Quality of Support was the number one reason organizations indicated they chose proprietary management tools.
  • 50% of respondents indicated that they are already using some form of cloud technology including but not limited to hosted applications, Amazon Web services and/or hosted storage.
  • The top IT management priorities for 2010 where monitoring, configuration management, patching and provisioning and security.
  • 40% of respondents planned to adhere to ITIL best practices in 2010, up from 33% in 2008 and 32% in 2007.

The complete Zenoss 2010 Open Source Systems Management Survey is published and freely available at http://bit.ly/oss-mgmt.

About Zenoss Core

Zenoss Core is an award winning open source network monitoring and systems management project that delivers the functionality to effectively manage the configuration, health and performance of networks, servers and applications through a single, integrated software package. The Zenoss Community is comprised of over 85,000 active members who are instrumental in evolving the solution as well as providing timely support and help for all questions. One of the most active projects on SourceForge, Zenoss Core has been downloaded over one million times and is being used by companies in over 180 countries. The Zenoss Core project is sponsored by Zenoss Inc., a commercial open source independent software vendor. For more information on Zenoss Core, visit http://community.zenoss.org.

About Zenoss Inc.

Zenoss is the leading provider of Dynamic Service Assurance to the next generation datacenter. Zenoss Enterprise is a purpose-built Dynamic Service Assurance product that assures IT service delivery to applications, business services and real-time physical, virtual and cloud-based infrastructures. With a community of over 85,000 users, Zenoss products monitor over one million network and server devices daily and have been used in over 25,000 organizations in 180 countries around the world. Commercial customers include leading companies such as Rackspace, VMware, LinkedIn, Carlson, Motorola and Deutsche Bank. To learn more about Zenoss' award-winning IT operations management software, visit http://www.zenoss.com.