While studying business before my start in Information Technology, we learnt lots of great concepts, like cross subsidisation, cash flow, bottom line vs top line, but the most lasting concept for me was Decision Support Systems. A relatively simple concept but incredibly powerful, better information means better decisions, systems which collect data and allow relationships, associations and connections to be found and made.

Enriching the data to make it information, these systems were called information systems, a term still used today but not as fashionable as cloud systems or something with a fantastic marketing meaning and little substance.

From my business studies I discovered that I had an affinity with computers, my wife says computers are scared of me, and I started studying computer science, the studies moved to data communication when QUT ended its interest at the time with CS, but the programming bug was planted. Later, late 90’s, while working with customers on how to get more information about their networks I learned how poor the available network management systems were, with a few exceptions.

I started tinkering with open source network management solutions about then, having been introduced to Linux in 1993, this was not a difficult stretch. My favourite at the time was Tobias Oietker’s MRTG. I made a few changes, wrote some reporting systems and along with some policy and SLA management systems, we launched a managed service provider business.

I learnt a lot. I changed jobs and was asked to deploy a management system, I asked “buy or build” and the decision was both – build what was needed and buy what made sense. The precursor to NMIS was born, and not long later NMIS was released to open source.

Initially, NMIS was designed to follow a few simple principles:

-Do more than one thing (completely against popular Unix doctrine of the time)
-Keep a history of everything (looking at anything over time is powerful)
-Use policies as well as configuration to make NMIS do things
-Make it do more with less configuration, by using defaults
-Summarise data into metrics and kpi’s, creating visible baselines
-Create information rather than data

This started from the idea that I am going to be polling the nodes for interface utilisation and CPU load, while I was already polling, why not poll a little extra data for fault? And why not keep some basic inventory information? Then why don’t I summarise the data for metrics? And it should threshold the data to create events and alerts.

I thought at the time that commercial companies might figure this out and release something which does all of this, after 5 years no one had and today there are only a few systems which do. By this stage the NMIS community had swollen and people who had similar views got involved in extending and enhancing NMIS, as a result NMIS remained in use for a long time.

Before joining Opmantek I had a long and convoluted career working with Cisco (twice) and Macquarie Bank performing many roles, from Network Consulting Engineer to Technical Leader to Network Architect then Solution Architect.

During this time I worked with big problems, networks with 15,000 routers in 2000, how to scale things, what to do with data from 500,000 devices, and learnt the importance of architecture, I also learnt a lot about knowledge, how tangible and intangible it can be.

In 2011 I joined Opmantek as CTO, we needed to do many things and I started thinking of the holes with network management systems I had designed before and what people needed to be able to do their jobs better and I have been working with the Opmantek customers and team since then on building software which complements NMIS and leverages all that information. I knew that the founding principles of NMIS had worked so we kept them.

Our focus has been around building knowledge systems, software which captures engineering knowledge and experience and encapsulates it so that companies can use our software to bolster their teams, allowing less skilled and experienced team members to leverage the knowledge already in our products as well as being able to add organisation specific knowledge.

Opmantek have also delivered a framework which supports knowledge automation. Allowing operational knowledge to be captured and then automated when needed.

I am very excited about the capabilities which Opmantek can deliver to an organisation and how those capabilities can help companies and especially their staff to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.

This article was written for and originally published in the ACCI Commerce and Industry Magazine – Autumn 2015.

The 52nd Australian Export awards marked a turning point for open source software in Australia with network management and IT Audit software company, Opmantek, recognised as the ICT exporter of the year for their innovative approach to development and customer acquisition.

Opmantek software is offered under a Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) model. This model has been largely overlooked in Australia despite the fact that it provides a huge value-add to growing businesses and significant cost savings to larger enterprise and government departments. Europe has been taking advantage of the flexibility and security of COSS for many years and more recently popularity has been growing in the Americas. With a no-cost framework providing the core functionality, additional features and specialist support services can be added at a fraction of the cost of a traditional off-the-shelf (OTS) solution and be customized to the suit the requirements of the business.

Opmantek develops network and infrastructure management tools that are essential to the smooth running of over 60,000 small and (massively) large organisations globally. Opmantek’s flagship product, NMIS, can be installed for free and helps IT teams detect faults, review current and historical network performance, and predict where future failures are likely to occur. Commercial support and additional business modules and custom dashboards can be added as the need grows. An astounding statistic is that every 6 minutes somewhere in the world an Organisation implements an Opmantek product.

COSS is an effective and safe way to update aging or disparate systems. COSS is generally easier to integrate, more secure and almost certainly lower cost than traditional commercial software while organisations deploying COSS receive the commercial support, certainty of product direction and company stability that Free Open Source Software (FOSS) usually lacks. In fact in the case of COSS it is indeed commercial software however users get access to the source code. Opmantek has shown through the commercial signing of some of the world’s largest telecommunications, government, and banking organisations that they are riding a strong global trend towards COSS and that COSS competes head on with commercial software companies, not with FOSS.

There are many benefits of COSS to organisations large and small and the global rise of COSS companies like Opmantek is set to continue – the proposition is compelling – increasing the capability of software systems, while reducing the cost. There also seems to be a compelling position for these companies in developed economies like Australia, the US and Europe – it is one way to combat the off-shoring of development and R&D – by maintaining key expertise in country and accessing a global community of contributors and followers at zero cost. The COSS revolution and coming of age in Australia has massive commercial benefits for organisations that embrace it and no doubt we will see the rise of more Australian software companies like Opmantek.