"Recently Gartner warned of the open source threat to the Big Four systems management vendors, but I don't think the current open source solutions are quite ready to take on the big four yet. Systems management just isn't easy. People tend to treat it like electricity and only realize its value when the power is out, but behind the scenes enormous complexity is battled in an effort to keep the lights on.
"Most entrants are going to lose the battle of scale. Scale seems like such a simple issue. Say you've got 150 Linux boxes you're monitoring. Whenever you need to you can just add another 150 boxes to double the capacity, right? You and I know that’s ludicrous. But since this is a hotly debated topic, and since scale can be hard to visualize, let's use a simple analogy we can all get behind: a fast car..."
