The team at Hyperic just announced their HyperFORGE site to provide developers with an easy way to create plug-ins to Hyperic HQ. They also started a plug-in of the month program to reward contributors. Good for the Hyperic team for getting HyperFORGE into place and keeping the communication between in-house and outside developers going. Of all of the OSS systems management vendors I believe that Hyperic has the The team at Hyperic just announced their HyperFORGE site to provide developers with an easy way to create plug-ins to Hyperic HQ. They also started a plug-in of the month program to reward contributors. Good for the Hyperic team for getting HyperFORGE into place and keeping the communication between in-house and outside developers going. Of all of the OSS systems management vendors I believe that Hyperic has the best technology for the broadest array of systems management and have become the clear innovator in the space. The Forge is starting with quite a few projects and I look forward to seeing more come down the pipe. Hyperic is at an inflection point in the state of their business growth along with the growth of open source in general. These types of communal development projects help to bring in a wider audience and prove that there is a large number of educated users–both of which create confidence for buyers. We’ve seen the Forge approach work well for SugarCRM, Zimbra, JasperSoft and Alfresco as they have expanded their partner networks and made it easy to contribute. Side note: I can tell you that it’s a big pain in the neck to get a good Forge system setup. We’ll be launching the MuleForge in early July to allow contributions and extensions to Mule and it’s been a huge grind. I fear that we have over featured by a long shot. Open Source