The "Opengear" name came about when were originally planning the new venture back in 2004. The founders (Bob Waldie and Tony Merenda) were active developers and supporters of the uClinux open source initiative, a popular open source platform in the embedded space and we decided our new business would develop solution in the changing infrastructure management space.

Our original plan was to develop open platforms and extend the "open source" model by opening up the hardware platform as well as the software. So we set out developing an open source console management software platform that could run on any Linux/Unix/Solaris hardware and also developed an open KVM hardware design. At this stage we spawned the okvm.sourceforge.net project and named ourselves "Opengear" which we though new and appropriate.

In the nagios space we recently developed and released SDT 4 Nagios. Now nagios is a great tool for centrally monitoring of all the computers, software and services in complex and dispersed network. SDT 4 Nagios is an addon to nagios which gives sysadmins point-n-click secure SSH tunneled access to the remote hosts across the network. It is fully open source (sdt.sf.net) and we are extending it now to work with the open source Groundwork Monitor program which is also Nagios based.

In the NUT space we dialog and work actively with the core development team in Europe to extend the coverage - we are not the core developer here but we are actively contributing to efforts spawned in the NUT2.4 where NUT now manages PDUs and well as UPSs (example, we are testing new releases and adding SNMP PDUs from an array of vendors to the NUT tree - again all open source).

In the 4th quarter of 2008 we added (43) new customers and (10) new resellers.  Our success was largely driven by providing our customers innovative open source tools to manage their remote infrastructure and  providing out-of-band access to UPS/PDU systems as well as Environmental Monitoring.  In addition, we are seeing system integrators in the government marketspace developing plans to launch open source alternatives to the proprietary infrastructure solutions on the market today.