OpenLogic Delivers BlueGlue 3.2 Open Source Stack

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Broomfield, Colorado-based OpenLogic is one of a growing number of companies trying to make a living by integrating and supporting a stack of open source software for enterprise customers, and the company has rolled out the latest release of its software stack, BlueGlue 3.2. The company has also created a free starter edition of a development stack aimed at Eclipse developers. This gives OpenLogic a two prong attack into corporations--those who already have applications running on open source code, and those who want to start developing in this manner.

According to surveys by Evans Data, some 60 percent of developers use open source software when they create the applications that their companies use or sell to others. But as anyone who uses open source software knows, keeping up to date with what is going on in terms of releases and patches for open source software is a job and a half. According to Andy Grolnick, vice president of marketing at OpenLogic, proprietary software is being challenged by open source alternatives because proprietary licenses are generally expensive, vendors tend to lock you in and force upgrades when they can, vendors never share their source code, and the generally very high quality software has a high cost of ownership and high complexity. Open source licenses are expensive or free, there are generally competing projects for a given piece of code (this is akin to vendor choice, often with the same code base for a given project), and users of the code have flexible licenses to source and get minimal pressure to upgrade. OpenLogic, as you might expect, says that the quality of open source software is high--just as high as proprietary alternatives, sometimes higher--but the company also concedes, by its very existence, that open source software has a big hidden cost and is plagued by equally hairy complexity issues as proprietary software.

The BlueGlue Open Source Infrastructure Management Suite, which first debuted as a beta program in late 2002, aims to deal with the high cost and complexity of supporting open source software. OpenLogic was founded in 1998 as EJB Solutions, and as the name suggests, it provided application development and integration services to corporations. To help make its consulting projects easier and give it an edge in the consulting business, the company created a way to automate the synchronization and updating of various popular open source applications; this product was originally known as Out of the Box. EJB Solutions rolled out releases of this stack, which it renamed to BlueGlue and expanded, through 2003, and in February 2004 it brought in a management team and a few months later changed its name to OpenLogic.

BlueGlue 3.0 was launched in June 2004, and was tweaked late last year. In March, OpenLogic secured $4 million in funding from four venture capitalists: Appian Ventures, Red Rock Ventures, Village Ventures, and Highway 12 Ventures. The company is using this money to expand its development and marketing activities and its physical facilities in the Denver-Boulder high tech corridor. At the same time, OpenLogic hired Doug Barre, formerly the chief operating officer at Borland, to be its chairman and Greg Orzech, who was head of sales at VA Software, to be its new vice president of sales. Both have deep experience in open source. The company currently has 13 employees and has a few production customers.

OpenLogic's latest release--BlueGlue 3.2--is a systems management program that can install and manage 125 open source programs on development and production machines servers. In addition to allowing the installation and removal of these programs using a feature called "stacros," which is short for stack macros, BlueGlue copes with the dependencies between open source programs--databases, development tools, Web servers, application servers, and such--that customers deploy. This is a big deal, since applying a patch to one program can have unintended consequences for another or many programs. And, OpenLogic gathers up all the software updates for the 125 open source projects and deploys them to customers on a quarterly basis. As the company grows, it will attempt to tighten that cycle for updates, but not so much as to make it unwieldy for administrators. Obviously, security patches always get priority. BlueGlue also consolidates all of the passwords for the 125 programs in the stack so system administrators don't go nuts trying to remember all of their different passwords.

The great thing about the BlueGlue stack is that OpenLogic is not just supporting Linux, even though it is obviously getting a strong start there. Grolnick says BlueGlue 3.2 will run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and that the company is thinking about backporting to Enterprise Linux 3; the software has also been certified on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and 9 and Microsoft Corp's Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 platforms. Right now, only 32-bit X86 versions of the stack are supported, but 64-bit versions on the X64 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are in the works. So is a BlueGlue stack for Sun Microsystems's Solaris 10 Unix variant. OpenLogic could support the various BSD variants of Unix as well, if it chooses to, and Power, Itanium, and mainframe platforms are also possibilities. "We have thought about these," says Grolnick, "but we haven't received customer requests for them yet."

The full BlueGlue software stack includes the software for those 125 open source projects, plus 15 sample stacks and the ability for customers to create their own stacks using the stacros. BlueGlue includes technical support (telephone and Internet), has 350 pages of documentation, and a knowledgebase for the projects that describes installation, testing, configuration, interoperability, and licensing for each project. Amazingly, BlueGlue only costs $399 per system per year, whether it is a desktop developer workstation or a giant production server. The BlueGlue Eclipse Starter Edition, which includes the Eclipse IDE and two dozen plug-ins from Eclipse to open source programs such as JBoss, MySQL, Struts, PHP, and others, has an even sweeter price: zero dollars. The starter edition is obviously aimed at getting developers used to using BlueGlue to develop so they will recommend using it in production. It is available through OpenLogic's Web site and will eventually be available through TechForge.