GroundWork Jumpstarts 2007 with Record Revenue, Marquee Customers and Community Contributions

Business Wire, April 25, 2007

Growing indirect channel contributes a third of total bookings

SAN FRANCISCO -- Groundwork Open Source, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com), the leader in open source systems and network management software, closed another record revenue quarter. GroundWork's software and services are now being utilized by organizations in over 20 countries worldwide to monitor and manage more than a million servers and network devices.

"GroundWork's strong start to 2007 demonstrates that open source systems and network management continues to gain a foothold in the mid-market as companies realize that they no longer need to fall victim to the costs of HP OpenView and others," said Ranga Rangachari, CEO of GroundWork Open Source. "These legacy proprietary solutions do not provide enough additional value to justify the magnitude more cost relative to open source alternatives, and that's good news for customers."

Gartner recently released a report entitled "'Big 4' Management Software Vendors Face Competitive Threats" noting that customer loyalty to the "Big 4" (HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol) is fragile and that the open source management industry appears to be a more immediate threat to the major IT management software vendors not pursuing open source products. The report also discussed customer dissatisfaction with the lack of interoperability of their proprietary tools, functionality that is inherent to GroundWork's open source solution.

Growing Customer List and Expanding Channel

GroundWork's recent customer additions include PlanetOut, State of Oregon, Podshow.com, Tacoma Public Schools, IT BV, InfoUSA and ADP (UK).

"We needed a strong monitoring solution to keep an eye on IT operations and network traffic but did not want to pay for features we would not use," said Tom Cignarella, Vice President of Technical Operations for PlanetOut. "GroundWork delivered, giving us clear insight into our network while taking advantage of the lower cost and flexibility of open source."

Further validating GroundWork's commitment to the channel-focused business model, the company derived a third of its business from the channel and signed new partners, including Incentra Solutions and e4e, to its Global Partner Network.

"At Incentra, our goal is to provide a full range of IT solutions for enterprise customers," said Gary Wallin, Director of Technical Services at Incentra Solutions. "Open source provides customers more flexibility, and you can't beat the price. It is a great fit for dynamic and heterogeneous IT environments operating under budget constraints. GroundWork's open source solution is going to change the IT operations market and provide new options for IT managers."

GroundWork Releases GroundWork Monitor Open Source 5.1

In April, GroundWork released the newest version of their entry-level monitoring solution, which includes a comprehensive web services engine for extensibility and easy integration with other open source and proprietary tools, as well as advanced performance analysis capabilities. The source and binaries are available as free downloads on SourceForge and via GroundWork's web site at http://www.groundworkopensource.com/downloads/. More than 10,000 downloads were recorded in April alone.

GroundWork also recently released three new modules for GroundWork Monitor Open Source - WMI plug-ins for monitoring Windows systems, Nagios [R] Service Check Acceptor Forwarding Engine (NSCAFE) to dramatically improve Nagios scalability, and HP OpenView Event Handler to feed Nagios output into an OpenView system.

With more than 2,000 registered members, the GroundWork Community Forum at http://www.groundworkopensource.com/community/ continues to provide support for all of GroundWork's open source offerings, allowing for the exchange of ideas and the provision of valuable insight to users who want to harness the power of open source software for managing their business-critical systems and networks.

GroundWork Monitor Professional Oracle Interoperability

In March, GroundWork announced the release of the Oracle 10g Extension for GroundWork Monitor Professional - the company's flagship monitoring solution - relying on the knowledge and advice of the system administrator community to identify and codify the most important best practices for monitoring and managing Oracle database.

Also in March, GroundWork announced a support agreement with Actuate Corporation to create the first open source reporting framework for IT infrastructure monitoring by integrating Eclipse BIRT Report Engine into GroundWork Monitor Professional.

About GroundWork

San Francisco-based GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (http://www.groundworkopensource.com) is the leader in the fast-growth market for open source IT management software. The company unifies proven open source projects into a complete software solution for monitoring and managing the performance and availability of the entire IT infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of traditional software. A member of the Open Solutions Alliance, GroundWork is dedicated to driving the adoption of comprehensive open source business solutions. Thousands of systems administrators across hundreds of organizations worldwide have downloaded and deployed our products to monitor and manage the performance and availability of over one million systems and network devices. GroundWork customers represent a variety of industries, including education, financial services, government, manufacturing, and high technology. The company is privately held, with investments from Canaan Partners, Mayfield Fund, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.