November 19th, 2007
Paglo asks, spider that network for you?
They haven’t figured out a way to make money off it yet, but Paglo is offering system managers a free spider giving them total visibility of network devices and software.
What’s the hitch? The resulting search index lives on the Paglo server. But it’s only accessible to you, via a password.
Beyond that, no hitch at all. (Please add the hitches you find to the comments.)
We first hinted at this in July, when it was called as Project Wishbone. Back then CTO Chris Waters had just sold a wireless security service where the GPL-licensed spider, then called Rogue Scanner, was developed.
Now the VC backers of that company, called Network Chemistry, are letting their winnings ride on Paglo.
But what of the business model? It’s a mystery, as Geoffrey Rush said in Shakespeare in Love.
“We’re operating with the philosophy that lots of users receive value from the platform, paying nothing, is more valuable than a few people using a system and paying a little bit. We are maniacally focused on delivering the most value and users as quickly as possible.
“This is very efficient from an investment perspective. There are also widely popular and successful models, if you just look at the consumer world, following this exact philosophy. Like Google. Google focused purely on search. That’s the right thing to do, drive massive use by delivering lots of value, first.
“We embedded community into Paglo. We want to provide IT understanding, and turn small IT shops into groups with the wisdom that large corporations have. The way to do that is through community.”
The business model, in other words, will reveal itself. You can’t get much more open source than that.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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