The $3.6 billion worldwide market for IT management software is ripe for competition from free software. Leading products from HP, CA, BMC and IBM are overkill for the vast majority of the market. Licensing costs can reach seven figures, and deployment and system administration costs are several times that. Not to mention that these products are widely known to be inflexible, monolithic and difficult to use.

At the same time, free software has penetrated close to three-quarters of all multi-billion dollar corporations and growth continues steadily. Industry research confirms that the primary reason IT organizations purchase free software solutions is the opportunity to reduce costs and improve technology performance. While leading products such as Linux, Apache and MySQL have generated the most attention, free software tools for IT management such as Nagios have matured and are poised for mainstream adoption. Since 2001, there have been 468,000 downloads of the Nagios program itself plus 221,000 for its plugins. Users include industry giants like ATT Wireless, Siemens, AOL, TicketMaster and TimeWarner Cable.

While leading products such as Linux, Apache and MySQL have generated the most attention, free software tools for IT management such as Nagios have matured and are poised for mainstream adoption

Combating inflexible platforms and vendor lock-in

Free IT management products are successfully competing against proprietary rivals—and for good reason. Proprietary IT management software tools and “platforms” such as HP OpenView and IBM’s Tivoli are difficult to configure and resource-intensive to manage. Such IT management solutions have been designed for the top tier of enterprise customers. Feature-rich and unnecessarily complex, they are replete with functionality that just isn’t needed by the vast majority of users. Increasingly inflexible and sclerotic, these IT management frameworks are hard to customize and difficult to configure. Deployment times can take **** months, even years, before value is achieved. And once they are installed, users face rigid vendor lock-in scenarios.

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Instead of being confined to a framework that precipitates add-on costs and maintenance fees (and limits future options), a free platform enables companies to easily link together existing monitoring tools and integrate new ones. Free IT management solutions can be customized to customer requirements given their configurable component architecture as well as their transparent, modifiable source code. They are also well suited to heterogeneous management tool environments, given their open interfaces. These free alternatives make an ideal “manager of managers” platform or can integrate as a peer to incumbent systems. They are also stable and reliable, having been broadly tested and peer reviewed.

Lowering TCO

Enterprises have expressed strong interest in cheaper alternatives that meet their IT management needs. Today’s proprietary IT management solutions typically require significant upfront license costs alone, with deployment and management costs running from $5 to $8 for every dollar spent on software. According to Forrester Research, 86% of companies indicate that low acquisition cost is the major reason for their decision to purchase free software, followed by 77% that express an expectation that they will lower their total cost of ownership. Likewise, according to Delphi Group, the biggest benefit driving the use of free software is total cost of ownership.

Whereas a framework solution may run in the six figures and offer 100 different features, a company needing only 5% of that functionality can pay just for those requirements