Whatever happened to the Open Management Consortium (OMC)?
Since last May when six open source management projects announced the formation of the OMC, the group has issued nary a peep of news.
Is there an agenda? “It is active,” Ofer Shoshan, CEO of open source management vendor Qlusters and a founder of the OMC, told internetnews.com.
“What we are going to do with the OMC is start an integration process
where different technologies will work together,” Shoshan explained. “This
is something that will drive some practical outcome so customers can
actually use the different open source technologies together and get
enterprise benefits from them.”
In that respect, the current goal of the OMC is little changed from its
initial charter of helping to establish and utilize standards that allow for
interoperability and integration of systems management solutions.
The six founding members of the OMC are Qlusters, Nagios, Webmin, Zenoss,
Emu Software’s NetDirector, Qlusters openQRM and Symbiot’s openSIMS. The OMC membership page now
boasts over 30 members projects and vendors.
“The thing that was missing was a real practical use for this group,”
Shoshan said. “What’s going to happen is we’re going to be using Qlusters’
openQRM application, which has an open architecture, as the glue to put all
the projects together.”
Under Shoshan’s plan, a customer that, for example, wants to use Zenoss’ monitoring and openQRM for provisioning can take the two pieces together and get everything under one console and one roof.
“The meat here is the integration; once you deliver the integration
people can actually do something with it and then it will grow and prosper,”
Shoshan argued. “If it’s just a nice concept and a lot of talk and PR, then
nothing will happen. And that is true for all groups, not just the OMC.”
But he also admitted that the the process to date could have gone much faster than it
has. “I guess that it’s only natural that when you have so many parties
involved different vendors, projects and interests sometimes things take
more time,” Shoshan said. “Now we are pushing around integration and I think
that is what will drive things forward.”
The OMC update comes on the heels of another interoperability
focused group that launched during the recent Linuxworld Open Solutions Summit. The Open Solutions Alliance, however, is focused on open source applications in general, compared to the management-focused OCM goals. But they’re both aiming for open source interoperability. Could there be strength in the groups’ numbers?
“I’m not fully aware of what their goals and charter is,” Shoshan said. “But
if it is similar in concept to the OMC I see no reason why we could not
work together.”
