Open source software ready for big business

"We make your stuff act as if it is Amazon though internally it may be working in a very different way," says Rich Wolski, CTO and co-founder of Eucalyptus.

Also on Network World's watch list is Cfengine, which develops Nova, a commercial edition of its open source server configuration management technology that adds full policy-based server life-cycle management. The company added technical and commercial-based support this year.

"Now companies are asking can you integrate with IBMIBM's monitoring platform, can you integrate with HPHP's monitoring platform, and the answer is yes," says Bob Whirley, president and COO for U.S. operations. Alles zu HP auf CIO.de Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de

A derivative of cfengine called Puppet, which is developed by Reductive Labs, is an up-and-coming open source option. The company, which just raised $2 million in venture capital funding, provides policy-based, automated configuration management using a Puppet Master server that knows all the policies and communicates those to Puppet clients running on host computers.The company is eyeing virtualized environments, especially those in cloud environments, as a key area of growth.

"Puppet is tying the data for how things should be configured to the enforcement," says Andrew Shafer, who helped found Reductive Labs. Google uses Puppet to manage all its workstations.