Open-AudIT: How it came to be and what’s next!

(FLASHBACK) It’s 1998, The Foo Fighters are playing in the background and updating your Windows NT and 98 desktops meant writing a batch script and copying it “BY HAND” onto individual devices, then running things one…at…a…time.

Working in a small financial institution the expense of using Microsoft SMS Server to manage your Windows PCs was far too expensive. So, when my manager would ask: “How many installs of MS Office do we have?”  I’d end up driving to every branch to record by hand, the MS Office installs on 100+ PCs * shivers *. Being the kind of guy who has always liked writing code, I set out to find a solution…and I DID.

Today the world’s leading network discovery, inventory and audit program turns Open-AudIT 21. Wow! I’m not entirely sure how that happened! If you haven’t already read my previous blog post about how Open-AudIT came to be, it’s worth a quick read. You can find it here.

So as projects age, things happen. Nothing stays the same – the project’s goals, the code, the infrastructure, the dependencies, the users, the features. It all changes. It all evolves. Not least of all, the project team changes. People come and people go. People want different things. I’m staying around, let’s not get too silly – but things are definitely changing.

Opmantek and the Open-AudIT customer base have enabled Open-AudIT to reach another level.

Moving forward, I’m excited to say we’ll have a big new announcement coming shortly about another version of Open-AudIT that will help customers yet again.

We’re able to push and pull data from other systems. Open-AudIT has had a JSON restful API for quite a while now and most of the Enterprise customers are using it for data import and export. Now we’re making moves to enable this “out of the box” for certain other systems to give everyone the benefit. It’s now ready for connecting to ServiceNow. If you would like to be able to use Open-AudIT as a discovery and data feeder into ServiceNow, just contact us at Opmantek and we can make it happen.

Everyone knows we’ve always had a great discovery tool because if you don’t know what’s out there, you can’t manage the risk associated with it. Even our competitors are challenged by Open-AudIT, despite their huge development budgets and big brands. Again, we couldn’t have got there without the support of our user base. In short, Opmantek, customers and dedication get us there.

All I can say at this point is that it’s been an entertaining ride and one that I have no plans to get off at any time soon. Stay tuned for more features, more performance, more options and more of everything you’ve come to know and love about Open-AudIT.

Onwards and upwards,

Mark Unwin.