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by Michael Cote.
Original Post: PeopleOverProcess.com: FiveRuns 1.0
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I met with FiveRuns' Steven Smith and Dave Wilby last Friday for a demo and a briefing. My first impression is that they have a solid 1.0 product that could become a serious and more wide-reaching contender in systems management as new releases come out. I've been quite gleeful and generally excited about FiveRuns since I met with Dave for a long lunch several months back; I'm happy to report that the excitement was justified.
My Over-exuberance
The problem, for me, at looking at FiveRuns objectively is that it's so cool that it's easy to go FanBoy and not look at it with critical eye. FiveRuns, like their AustinVenture funded sibling Spiceworks, has an extremely sexy and unencumbered-by-the-past (or "fresh" as they call it) approach to what a systems management platform should look at act like. They're using Rails, AJAX, and they're offering their software as a hosted service, or SaaS. Also, they're taking an approach I'm beginning to think of as "lean systems management." All of those are things that get my over-exuberance engines reving too high.
As I told Steven and David towards the end, looking at FiveRuns from the over-all perspective -- current functionality, workflow, UI & usability, pricing, deployment, and my gut feel for their future functionality -- they're the most impressive offering in their category I've seen yet. Others may offer more breadth, better pricing, and so forth, but if you equal out the weight of all the considerations, FiveRuns looks the most impressive over-all.
So, with that high-praise out of the way, how 'bout we move into what's missing and needs to be done.
To Do: Breadth and Management
As my notes on the meeting outline, they monitor 8 OSes and 4 pieces of middle-ware. Like all of The New Systems Management folks, they'll need to add more applications (e.g., Exchange), stacks, middle-ware, and even things like web pages (uptime and beyond) in the near future. Unless I missed something, FiveRuns also lacks management functionality: restarting services and boxes, cleaning up file systems, and other "write"/action operations.
Breadth and management are the key next steps for making FiveRuns not only a highly useful and competitive SMB systems management platform but an enterprise one as well. I hesitate a little to mention the enterprise part but, as I'll hopefully point out in an upcoming post, that hesitation is due to the way "enterprise systems management" is currently defined. Changing that definition is part of what The New Systems Management guys will need to do if they want to get into The Big 4's category...if they want to avoid taking on the scale of development, integration, support, and marketing that The Big 4 do to fuel the current idea of what enterprise systems management is.
Back to the Good
Nonetheless, coming from the stodgy world of enterprise systems management, the UI (OS X inspired and AJAX-enabled), workflow, and general approach to systems management is fantastic. As it is now, if you want to monitor RedHat, SUSE, OS X, Windows, Solaris, Apache, MySQL, JBoss, and/or Tomcat, FiveRuns is worth taking a look at. They're using a hosted, SaaS model and charge $60/month per server (regardless of CPU or number of applications).
As usual, consider that I have an IOU to you, dear readers, to write-up a more detailed briefing-note. In the meantime, you might enjoy my mindmap notes on the topic.
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