Every once in a while a software vendor steps out of the box.  Tideway Systems has done so with the introduction of the Community Edition of their core product, Foundation.  You may be saying to yourself; there’s nothing new with being able to download a 30 day trial or evaluation version of software,; Microsoft and Symantec have offered this for years.  You’d be right, except for the fact that this particular version of Tideway Foundation is not trialware, it is the full, unencumbered product, except for the fact that it will allow you to scan up to only 30 hosts.  So it will function beyond the typical 30 days and you do not need to contact Tideway every 30 days for a new key.

If you are a bleeding edge and always like to have your hands on the latest and greatest software, Tideway Systems has also released a pre-release version of their new Foundation 7.2.  The are quick to post warnings all over the download page making sure that the individual downloading the software realizes that the pre-release version is beta and unsupported.  With that in mind, Tideway does have a pre-release forum where individuals who have downloaded one or both of these versions can converse with the Tideway Community and seek assistance from other Tideway users.  Tideway’s own engineering and consulting ranks have been known to peruse the forums and offer the guidance and assistance from time to time.

Both versions are released in a compressed VMWare Image utilizing VMWare’s virtual appliance technology.  The underlying operating system in the Virtual Appliance is Red Hat Linux, so if you are familiar with any Linux variant, you should be able to get the software up and running fairly quickly.  For those that need some assistance, there is decent documentation to assist you with the install.  Furthermore, Tideway does a great job of pointing out the steps to go through to ensure you will be able to scan your environment.  Experience has shown that you should try this in a lab or development environment prior to trying this in production.

I wonder if Tideway’s competitors will follow their lead and offer something similar for their solutions.  HP, IBM, BMC, and EMC all do not offer this sort of option for their application mapping technologies.  In most cases, access to their software on a “try before you buy” basis is reserved for their largest customers, not for small and medium sized customers who have a desire to try this sort of technology out.  Furthermore, since there is not a solution like Tideway in the open source world, it has limited the ability for those small or medium sized business to really try this technology.

Hats off to Tideway for taking the bold step and offering their software for download right on their website to anyone.  All one needs to provide is an e-mail address and you are on your way to downloading the VMWare image.  I would recommend a high speed connection as well since the images are over 1GB each.

Richard Muirhead and Adam Kerrison, Tideway System’s CEO and CTO respectively, are known for their innovative and unique approach to marketing software solutions.  Only time will tell if the firm will move to the opensource community and offer Foundation as an open source solution.  Due to Foundation’s operability, I am confident it would make a great companion to Nagios or Zenoss, both of which are popular open source monitoring solutions.  I am not sure if Tideway Systems will take the leap towards open source or not, but it sure seems like it is the next natural progression for the firm as they continue their work towards transforming the application discovery and dependency mapping arena as the last independent software firm in this space.