I mean, that's a good point, I mean, in the middle here, to kind of overview what your guys sort of thing, what round of way of going about things is, I mean, can you describe that briefly, like what the pulling together that you do? Sure, so there's a couple different ways you could go about building a network and system management project if you're going to go out and try to address the big four. One concept would be, I'm going to try to do it all in-house from soup to nuts, and there are certainly people out there who do that, and that's one approach, and it has pros and cons. The other approach, which is the one we take, is we say, okay, there are a lot of projects out there, like NAGAs, like Ganglia, that are pretty good at a specific point area functionality. And in fact, there's so many of them, in fact. They're good at their particular area, you kind of go, gee, what if I could tie them all together, right? So in our particular case, what we build really has to do is a framework, for the most part. So we actually build, so if we kind of slice it all up, right, you've got the guys, there's the generation layer, which are things being generated by systems. Okay. Right. And then you've got a collection layer where using whatever kind of monitoring protocol or technology you're doing, you're pulling it in, it could be SNMP, it could be WMI, you could be good at pulling in XML streams, et cetera, et cetera. Or just looking at blog files. Or just looking at blog files. Right. There's a lot of different ways to do it. RPC if it's really old school Windows stuff. You're pulling all that in. And then finally, you get to the middle and top layers where you're saying, okay, now I've got to make an engine that slices and dices this stuff, figure out what needs to be processed, what isn't, what's an alert, what's not. And then you need to have a presentation layer, the whole top part. So we're really focused for the most part on the top two layers at the engine portion and the presentation layer. What this allows us to do is we can go to, let's say, like Ganglia, who is a cluster monitoring
2:03project. And it's really good at what it does. And it's designed to basically keep track of nodes within a cluster. And there's a lot of different ways you can do it. But it doesn't really have an event console all by itself. So if you were like one of our customers and you're saying, I have a grid of 9,700 machines out there running something, you can say, okay, I'm going to use Ganglia for this part. But to take it to the next level, to really provide the management and the analysis and everything else, it needs to have stuff coupled with it. So Groundwork's philosophy is to basically, we want to be the one who is sort of the grand unifier of a lot of these various components. And they don't necessarily have to be open. We can obviously, in cooperation with guys like Nagios, we can ship the Nagios pieces with our product. You can't do that though for proprietary stuff, but that doesn't mean you can't hook it in. So what that means we can do is, so we now create a system that we can pull in basically the best of breed point solutions together at the monitoring level, whether they're proprietary or not. And we can then combine them together into a holistic whole. Right. The answer is to questions like this is always both. Right. But do you have more of sort of like the stack of stuff that's together or sort of like a pile of things that you can integrate together? I mean, what's kind of the approach that you initially take? Do you carve, do you build up all the stuff you want or carve away the things you don't want? You're right. The answer is both. So let's talk about, you know, which one's kind of in what bucket. Yeah. That's right. So, you know, out of the box, you know, so to speak, if we take, let's say, our Grammar Monitor Community Edition, our professional product, you know, right out of the box, it has the Nagios monitors and there's, you know, hundreds of plug-ins that you can use for Nagios to monitor, you know, even really, really weird stuff. Right. You know, IP toasters or whatever else. That's one of the benefits of open source stuff in this area is that it only takes one confident person with a weird thing to make it exist. So anyway, so out of the box, we got the Nagios piece and there's oodles, oodles of plug-ins that cover, you know, unbelievable amounts of stuff.
4:03And then we kind of, you know, move up the stack a bit. And then there's a bunch of components that also get into, let's say, reporting, for example. We use the BERT engine for our reporting. Right. So those things are already in there, as is the full set of functionality you need in terms of the console, if you're talking about some profiles that are already included for, you know, the more common things that are, you know, you would want to monitor. So the preset configurations with defaults and things like that. And of course, the web interface and the server it all runs on and everything else. Then, you know, kind of the next level is, well, what's in that kind of, you know, pull stuff around bucket? So there are integration pieces that we have developed for things like, let's say, ticketing systems that are available off the shelf for our professional service guys to hook up for. When we get down to it, so we also have a lot of other things that are not, let's say, bundled in with it right away, but you can download. So, for example, our Ganglia plugin isn't in the default RPM set. It's like an optional extension. It's an optional extension, right. And then we also have what we call a Groundwork Connect, which is our support site where people who are subscribers to us can log in. And not only do they usually have the regular support, you know, interface in terms of, you know, knowledge base and submitting problems and all this kind of stuff. There's another area there where they can share content with each other as well. Which is another thing that doesn't get talked about a lot in the system management world, which is that... Sharing knowledge, if you will. Well, right. And also sharing things that are not code. Yeah. Because most of the guys who are sysadmins, they're not full-time coders or maybe not even part-time ones. They script a lot, but they're not spending a lot of time instead of a... They need to be able to, like, share the procedure of going about... Procedures and scripts and other kinds, you know, custom reports they build, these kind of things. A lot of them, you know, don't necessarily spend a lot of time inside a compiler and don't want to, right? Right. So this kind of gives a level of user-contributed content, which kind of happens in parallel to whatever's happening with our interactions with the community as well, right? Right. So you have a new version coming out. We do have a new version. And so what are the kind of highlights that are coming in?
6:04Right. So we've got two things coming out next Tuesday the 25th. We've got Groundwork Monitor Enterprise, which is basically taking the components that we have been selling individually for Groundwork Monitor professionals. Wow. And we are creating a product line so that when people know that they're going to be in one of those kind of distributed environments, they know which version to pick. Right, okay. Right. So that, Groundwork Monitor Enterprise basically allows you to add child servers and distributed mining agents and standby servers. Right. So that if you're in a... Sort of high availability stuff. High availability stuff and capacity stuff that if you're...and we also...it also allows for you to add the network management pieces as well. So if you're in one of these bigger shops, if you're into the high hundreds or thousands of servers, that's the one you want to be looking at. Right. And then we have the professional product, which if you can run everything off of one server, that's the one you want to be looking at. And then we have the community edition, and that's the one where if you're, you know, less than a hundred servers and you want to use the free version or you want to kind of roll your own or you want to do as an eval for one of the other ones. Sure. Because it's the same code base. We give you a bunch of RPMs and it basically bumps you up. 5.2, which is the new version, is a update to all of them. Right. So 5.2 is a... It's across the board. Right. And there's a lot of different features within 5.2 that were really geared in particular to providing beefier functionality for those enterprise guys. That's what everyone in your space is doing, you know, in the past however many months is beefing up performance, right? Beefing up performance. So I imagine all of you guys are encountering customers who are like, this is great, but we've got to turn it up to 11, man. And... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's a good space to be in. Sure. I mean, we don't regret that by any means. So we've got things that are... There's things that happens at the performance level. Like we've got everything from plumbing level stuff that give, for example, 5 to 10 volt increases on, you know, message processing, you know, way down in the guts up to, we've got guys in the beta tests who, from more of an end user perspective, are seeing, you know, 30% increases
8:04in the, you know, the number of nodes they can monitor for one device. Right, right, right. On top of all, though, there are a lot of presentation layer things that you have to do when you get an enterprise that don't really come into play. Like suddenly you've got, you know, this many more messages and events getting in front of the, you know, system administrator in question. So this point, A, you've got to be fast enough to do it, but the other part is that because there's now this greater volume of information, you have to provide him tools to make sense of it. That's right. So in our particular case, we put in a lot of filters and searching capabilities that allow them to make more sense of, you know, this voluminous amount of data. Right, right. There's sort of filtering and focusing improvements in the UI for things. Correct. As well, because again, we're talking about these integration points, is we found a lot of guys want to go in and they want to kick things off to other systems while they're in our console. There's a, basically, if you right click in, let's say, an event, you can select an action. For example, like, go kick off a travel ticket, pipe it into, let's say, the Remedy system. Oh, right, right. And it's actually a bi-directional integration too, so it comes back clear and you can actually go in. Is that primarily for help desk sort of situations or are there other sort of workflows you can kick off? Like, I mean, could you kick off doing some provisioning or something like that, if, like, you found some box that... So there's an API there, and to the extent that you could kick off a provisioning action, this gets into, like, data center automation at the end, that would really depend on what the provisioning thing is on the other side. Right, right. So I would say if it was something... So, I mean, it sounds like the right click thing you're talking about essentially will collect a bunch of parameters and then execute some external process if you will. Yes, yes, that's correct. And so that's, I mean, that's where you're getting at is that if, one, there was someone who wanted to write this stuff, or, you know, whether it was you or someone else, and also if the external thing was amenable to being kicked, as it were, to being kicked off. The other thing that we've also put in is we've found a lot of people who also want to have our stuff visually live alongside other stuff as well. Right. And so we put in what's called Rapid, which basically lets you put another web-based console
10:08interface running within Groundwork as well. So, for example, if you want to have some Atlassian product like JIRA, and you want to see it all within, in essence, you know, while you're within the same console view, you can go and you can do it, and it launches, you know, kind of, you know, in another tab, if you will. And there you can kind of have one grand, unified control center. And that's where we see guys in, like, NOC operation centers. Where they want the big board. Right, exactly. They also made a bunch of enhancements to make it easier to set up in terms of auto-discovery and auto-configuration, and that can work a couple different ways. One of which is that we can go out and do the discovery for you, and so we can find it. And the other option, and this is, again, something around here in a bigger environment, is people who want to import stuff that's already been discovered by something else. They've already got the nicely, clean, scrubbed discovery data. Right, so they've got this sense of what's out there already, and it could be that they're using, it could be an open source product, it could be a proprietary one, it doesn't matter, but it's stored in a format, so we can suck that into it. And is that like an XML thing, or just a spreadsheet that you imported to that, or how does that work? It depends on what it is, you know, believe it or not, more often, and it's dictated mostly by what we're sucking it from, more often than not, these days, it sounds kind of old school, it's a CFE file half the time. Sure, sure. But it works. I mean, that's a perfect, it's just line-by-line stuff, right? Right, right. It's just a list of, it's just a table, basically. And there's another reason why they're conscious about this, and this is something that people don't always realize in enterprises, when you kick off a discovery process, if you haven't forewarned other people, particularly in the security department, that you're going to do so, you know, all sorts of, you know, alarm bells can go off when you start probing everything in the network. We also mentioned there's a lot of enhancements we made to basically the performance capabilities, there's a lot of improvements we did to the reports and new graphs and everything. You can never have too many reports. And you've had BERT in there for a while, right? We have had BERT in there for a while. That's not a new thing. No, the BERT itself isn't new, but our enhancements of the ODA portion of it is, and including,
12:14you know, more out-of-the-box kind of reports that most people seem to want. It's a fine balance to provide the reports most common versus, you know, really bizarre corner case custom things, but... Right, like monitoring your IP toasters from... Right, monitoring IP... That probably wouldn't be one that's going to be... Response time for toast popping out. Exactly. You know, that kind of stuff. Well, thanks. I appreciate you taking all this time. That was great. It was great.