The open source movement has been able to provide small and medium businesses with functional products at reasonable prices. GroundWork Open Source, whose business is based on delivering open source systems and network management tools, has decided to make its product available as a Linux based appliance, a change that could make it easier for small and medium businesses to deploy its management system.GroundWork Open Source announced Grounwork Monitor Enterprise Quickstart, an appliance running on Novells SUSE Linux Enertprise 11 operating system. The GroundWork Monitor is designed to manage networks, servers, operating systems, applications and databases. The product relies on Nagios plug-ins to collect performance information and works with various monitoring techniques, such as SNMP, syslog and WMI. Grounword Monitor Enterprise Quickstart, which costs $59 for a one year license, can control up to 100 devices.

Traditionally, systems and network management tools were too complex and too expensive for small and medium companies to deploy. GroundWork Open Source has been one vendor at the forefront of delivering inexpensive, easy to deploy management tools for businesses. Linux has been the Gold Standard operating system among open system users, and Novells Suisse has been a popular choice. The pairing of the operating system and the management tool seems quite natural.