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Guest blogger David Dennis of GroundWork explains some of the tangible benefits of using a SUSE Powered virtual appliance version of their popular GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Quickstart.

For those of you unfamiliar with GroundWork, we’re a commercial open source company providing availability and performance monitoring for systems, applications, and networks. As a venture-backed startup, we need to be lean, efficient, and agile to compete against our established competitors. We see ourselves as a plucky software David in a world full of gargantuan technology Goliaths and our SUSE-powered virtual appliance has been a great rock for our sling.

Back in December, we launched a SUSE Powered virtual appliance version of our popular GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Quickstart. Besides selling deploying over 100 customers in the first 100 days, here are some of the tangible benefits that we have seen:

· Quick and easy installation process

· Portable, scalable, and morphable

· Simpler to develop, Q&A, and support

· Better disaster recovery, update, and migration

· Straightforward to use for “Windows People”

Basically this allows us to build our products cheaply and price them aggressively – a real advantage in a tough IT market. To put yet another way, by launching virtual appliances we gained more customers, in less time, spending less money, than anything we tried in the past.

What are your experiences with software appliances? What kind of results have you seen?

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.