Sponsor Interview: N2Net
Welcome back to our series of sponsor interviews... This time around we talked to the folks from N2Net, another fine sponsor of OLF in more ways than one: N2Net founder Gregory Boehnlein is also one of the OLF organizers, and has poured a lot of his personal time into helping to organize OLF over the past few years. Let's start with some background on N2Net.
N2Net: N2Net, a New Age Consulting Service Company was founded in 1994 as an Internet Service Provider and Small Business Consulting company. Our mission is to empower our clients through technology. We've been using Linux at our core since pre 1.0 kernel days. We specialize in providing commercial, best of breed Linux based products such as Astaro (Linux based firewall), Defender MX (Linux based Spam Filtering), Netgear ReadyNAS Storage Appliances and Switchvox (Linux based PBX using Asterisk).
Q: How does N2Net work with the Linux/open source community? How does Linux and the community help N2Net?
N2Net: Many of our operations staff actively contribute to open source projects such as the Linux kernel and Asterisk PBX. We have also offered meeting space for more years that I can count for several of the area LUGS and Open Source groups.
The Linux and Open Source community help us a great deal by providing solid, reliable code that WORKS! When customers ask us "Why Open Source?" the answer is simple... "It works, it's flexible and you'll never be forced into a vendor-lock situation."
Q:Does N2Net contribute to the Linux/open source community, and if so, how? (Obviously, in addition to supporting OLF.)
N2Net: Gregory Boehnlein, one of the founders of our company, has been active in Open Source related "evangelism" since before the company existed. Aside from the countless hours spent on Ohio Linuxfest planning as a conference organizer, Greg has contributed patches and fixes to RedHat, CentOS and Debian distributions, has packaged and maintained countless RPMS and hacked on projects such as the Cobalt (now Blue Quartz) appliances. Greg routinely speaks at conferences on the subject of Open Source and has recently been focusing his efforts on Open Source Telephony solutions using the Asterisk Open Source PBX, to which he is a contributing developer.
Q: How are your customers using Linux and open source?
N2Net: Most of our current customer base are using Linux and FOSS solutions that have been packaged by commercial companies. A typical client will use a Switchvox PBX for their phone services, connected to an Astaro Firewall for security. Their E-mail will be filtered by Defender MX at our Data Center, and generally their Website will be hosted on a Linux server running the PLESK control panel. While we appreciate the ability to custom build solutions for our clients, our focus is providing commercially supported Open Source solutions that have been packaged and provide us with a second level of support.
Q: Why is Linux/FOSS an important technology for your company?
N2Net: Linux and FOSS are important to N2Net because they provide rich features, incredible stability and insane flexibility to our clients at a fraction of the cost of traditional proprietary solutions. We don't sell "Linux" solutions to customers.. we sell solutions to their business issues. Linux and FOSS just happen to be the most effective way to accomplish those goals for our customers and allow them to focus on their business.
Q: Where do you see the Linux/FOSS market going in the next year?
N2Net: We see incredible promise in the Open Source Telephony market as Asterisk continues to disrupt the Small Business communications market. We also see renewed movement in the Network Attached Storage and IP SAN market driven by Virtualization and Server Consolidation. It is going to be very interesting to see what the next year brings for the likes of Vmware (now that they have gone Public) and Xensource (now that they have been bought by Citrix).
Q: How does supporting OLF fit into your company's strategy?
N2Net: Ohio Linuxfest is an opportunity for us to reach out to the community and say "Thank You!" for all of the time and effort that the community has poured into various projects. It is also an opportunity for us to connect with other vendors and see how their products might fit into our future goals. I'm particularly interested in talking w/ Imagestream, Vyatta and Zenoss this year, as well as Silicon Mechanics to see what their thoughts are.
Q: Also, if there's something you feel it's important to address, but we haven't asked, feel free to add that as well.
N2Net: I'd just like to say "Thank You" to everyone that has ever answered a question on a mailing list, helped someone install linux, submitted a patch or told a friend about Linux. And please stop by our booth and introduce yourself, because we would love to hear from you!