Hyperic has announced a Series A investment from venture firm Accel Partners (press release). Although the funding amount was not listed in the press release, VentureWire is reporting the number to be $2.5 million U.S. (with a projected $3.25 million U.S. first round goal). It also announced that Larry Augustin (formerly of VA Linux) has joined the company’s Board of Directors and that Bob Bickel (formerly of JBoss) is serving as a “key strategic advisor” for the company.

Although Hyperic itself is not an open source company, its HQ management product is geared toward open source customers. The product was originally provided by Covalent as CAMS – The Covalent Application Management Server, but the team left Covalent to pursue this business independently several years ago. Hyperic’s CEO, Javier Soltero, was formerly a Covalent employee.

I visited Hyperic’s San Francisco office in early 2005, and the company was operating in true startup mode – one large room packed with people, limited furnishings, poor lighting, and a small conference room for meetings. Metered street parking was available nearby. It actually brought back some fond memories of the early .com days. Flush with cash, they may have new space plans in mind (or maybe not!).

Although the systems management space is a complex market dominated by the big guys, Hyperic is focused on the growing open source management issue. They should join the Open Management Consortium (OMC) that I mentioned in yesterday’s posting.

As a disclaimer, you should know that I was a Covalent CAMS customer and a beta site for Hyperic’s HQ while I was at La Quinta. In fact, the Hyperic / JBoss partnership was born out of a conversation I had with Marc Fleury in May 2004 in the back seat of a car on the way to dinner, but that’s a story for another time.