Opsview

From open source software project to successful software subscription business

High impact events
Telling the Opsview story at Monitorama PDX 2018

Founded in 2003, Opsview was originally a spin-off of a well known open source systems monitoring platform called Nagios. A small team of friends built it at Altinity, a company that was acquired in 2009 by a consulting firm called Opsera.

Opsera had been building large online platforms for clients like Virgin Money Giving for several years. But its founder, Mike Walton, wanted to create a stable, sustainable subscription-based software business.

A year after I joined Opsera, it sold off its consulting division to focus solely on taking Opsview to market.

Opsview Ltd. had immediate success by building an end-to-end marketing automation platform and creating a neatly tiered product model that encouraged upgrades based on host usage and premium features. I took the lessons I learned at Opsview to help MariaDB and then Ubuntu but always tracked the company’s fortunes.

In June 2017, it seemed clear to me that Opsview needed my help again. I returned to find a product story in need of a significant overhaul in advance of the launch of Opsview Monitor 6.0, a micro-services based version of their software that could service the scaling requirements of its largest customers, including Allianz, BT, Sky, Cisco, Sony, NTT, Telefonica and PayPal.