User:PaulineSinclair/sandbox

Opmantek Company Overview
Opmantek is a public company that owns the intellectual property to NMIS – a leading Network Management software application. Opmantek is debt free and financially strong. NMIS is a commercial open source software application that was originally developed in 1999. NMIS is a leading network management application and is used by approximately 10,000 organisations around the world.

NMISv8 was released in mid 2011 and remains in a Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) model. Opmantek offers commercial software modules and commercial services including support, customisations, implementation and training.

Opmantek has a modern business model, leveraging open source software development, virtual appliances and cloud technology and exporting globally via the internet.

NMIS and COSS Business Model
NMIS monitors the status and performance of an organization’s IT environment, assists in rectification and identification of faults and provides valuable information for IT departments to plan expenditure and IT changes. Opmantek’s business model differentiates its product as follows: •	Customers can utilise more of their budget for services to support, customize and implement the solution rather than on expensive license fees; •	Users have access to source code; •	Users may modify code and share modifications with each other; •	Users submit modifications back to Opmantek and Opmantek may release the modifications to the wider group as part of the NMIS product. •	Opmantek sells support services (software maintenance), customisations, training, implementation, consulting and commercial software modules that work with and leverage NMIS functionality.

Competitive Advantage - The Opmantek Difference
Opmantek offers NMIS under a Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) model. This business model is disruptive to traditional software suppliers and has the following “hard” benefits over traditional software suppliers: •	A much lower purchase price of software to the purchaser/end user; •	A much lower purchase price of support to the purchaser/end user; •	A much lower purchase price of customisations to the purchaser/end user; •	Ability for customer’s to utilise more of their budget for services to ensure they get the most out of the system; •	Lower costs of delivery for Opmantek.

In addition, the following “soft” benefits are achieved through the COSS model over traditional software suppliers. •	A stronger user group community and user feedback; •	Lower risk for customers due to ability to interact with similar customers; •	An ability for Opmantek to better “market test” software; •	Higher ability for users to integrate and adapt software; •	Rapid customer focused software advancement and bug fixes.

The features of the NMIS software have the following unique differentiators from competitor’s products which are more deeply explained in the innovations area: •	Business Rules Engine; •	Automated, Live Base Lining (measures performance and reliability against previous performance and reliability and against a service level defined within the business rule set); •	Performance and status collection from a single poll cycle; •	Integrated distributed network and device polling; •	Able to scale to very large networks as well as down to small.

In addition to key product differentiators, Opmantek’s business model leveraging open source software development and the corresponding collaboration that occurs between Opmantek and the user group provides Opmantek with a global team of product experts to draw on when needed.

Network management software is notoriously difficult to implement and NMIS has a reputation for working “out of the box”. NMIS is also highly scalable and is well known for its ability to be able to manage large and complex networks/large numbers of devices.