We continue to watch the growth and evolution of open source systems management vendors, particularly those growing their enterprise products and customers. Companies such as Groundwork, Hyperic and Zenoss — featured last year in our report CAOS 4 Managing in the Open — have demonstrated traction and staying power in the enterprise, largely based on their increased deployment alongside and, sometimes, in place of systems management software from the so-called ‘Big Four’ of BMC, CA, HP and IBM. This week came word that it is not only the customers of these vendors that are serving as targets for open source players.

Zenoss announced it had just hired five new executives. No, they did not manage to hire away one executive from each of the Big Four (close), but Zenoss did land some high-level folks from BMC and CA, as well as other vendors including now-Oracle-owned ClearApp, Novell, Sun and with one new hiree’s background, Wily and IBM. We have seen this scenario go the other way, most notably with the departure of William Hurley, aka ‘Whurley’ from Qlusters to join BMC in February 2007. However, it seems recently that the trend is toward the newer, open source players picking off talent from the larger, established vendors.

Zenoss, which just released a Professional Edition of its systems management software for medium-sized organizations, announced five new employees with experience from the more traditional systems management vendors. New Zenoss VP of Product Marketing Chris Farrell comes to the systems management company after serving previously as the first product management director at Wily Technology (acquired by CA for $375m in January 2006) and at IBM, Ericsson and ClearApp. Zenoss also has a new Director of Federal Sales in Phil Higgs, who was previously VP of Marketing at ClearApp (acquired by Oracle for an undisclosed amount in September 2008). New Zenoss Director of Engineering Mike Lunt comes to the open source systems management vendor from BMC and will be responsible for Zenoss’ worldwide engineering. Another new addition, Director of Global Alliances Brian Riley, comes to the company from Novell and will now focus on developing partnerships with systems integrators and other software companies, a place where we have long seen opportunity in the space. Zenoss also adds Director of Product Management Brandon Whichard, who prior to joining Zenoss was Product Line Manager for Sun Microsystems’ Provisioning products. Whichard also spent time with Evity and then BMC when it bought the Web monitoring software company.

While the threat from open source systems management vendors remains relatively small given the install bases and market shares of the Big Four, the latest hires from Zenoss make it clear that the threat concerns not only customers, but systems management technical and business talent as well.