Vendor lineage
The OpenNMS Group - OpenNMS
One of the oldest open source network management platforms, started in 1999, with a company behind it since 2004 and NantHealth as owner since 2020.
OpenNMS is a free and open source network monitoring and management platform written in Java - fault management, performance data collection, service monitoring, event processing and topology mapping - started in July 1999 by Steve Giles, Brian Weaver and Luke Rindfuss at their company PlatformWorks and registered on SourceForge as project 4141 in March 2000, about two months after the project that became Nagios. The OpenNMS Group, the company that provides commercial support, training and the Meridian enterprise distribution, was founded in September 2004 by Tarus Balog, Matt Brozowski and David Hustace.
The project nearly died twice before the company existed. PlatformWorks was bought on 28 September 2000 by Atipa, a Kansas City Linux systems vendor that renamed itself Oculan in July 2001, and in September 2002 Oculan stopped supporting OpenNMS. Tarus Balog, then an Oculan employee, left to continue the project independently, and two years later founded The OpenNMS Group with Brozowski and Hustace. The Order of the Green Polo was set up shortly afterwards to govern the project separately from the commercial business.
Two release streams came out of that arrangement: Horizon, the community release with new features, and Meridian, the enterprise release with longer support cycles, both under the AGPLv3. The platform's own description of itself is the oldest claim in this category - the world's first fully open source enterprise-grade network service monitoring platform - and the awards list runs from LinuxWorld 2006 to InfoWorld's Best of Open Source in 2015.
On 22 July 2020 NantHealth closed its acquisition of The OpenNMS Group, then based in Morrisville, North Carolina, with David Hustace as chief executive, calling it the world's premier open source network management company with customers including three Fortune 100 companies; no terms were disclosed. The company's about page today gives an address in Lewisville, Texas, and NantHealth as parent. A healthcare technology company owning a network monitoring platform is an unusual pairing; the release describes the platform as serving healthcare, technology, finance and government customers.
- Wikipedia: OpenNMS - the project started in July 1999 by Steve Giles, Brian Weaver and Luke Rindfuss at PlatformWorks, registered on SourceForge as project 4141 in March 2000; PlatformWorks acquired by Atipa 28 September 2000, renamed Oculan July 2001; support ended September 2002; The OpenNMS Group founded September 2004 by Tarus Balog, Matt Brozowski and David Hustace; the Order of the Green Polo; Horizon and Meridian; AGPLv3; awards 2006 to 2015 (read 2026-10-06)
- NantHealth 8-K exhibit 99.1, Culver City, 27 July 2020: NantHealth acquires OpenNMS; the transaction closed on 22 July 2020; based in Morrisville, NC; David Hustace CEO; three Fortune 100 customers; no terms (read 2026-10-06)
- OpenNMS - About: 'the world's first fully open source enterprise-grade network service monitoring platform'; founded 2004; Lewisville, Texas address; NantHealth as parent; Meridian (read 2026-10-06)