"My director of IT operations used to wake up at 5:30 every morning in order to give me a 7 a.m. report on any outages," Bell said this week. That became unnecessary after Milpitas, Calif.-based Phoenix began monitoring the 300 servers at its 12 offices worldwide with GroundWork's open-source technology.

"My bosses don't ask me anymore if our systems are stable," Bell said. Moreover, he figures he has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by choosing San Francisco-based GroundWork over a more established vendor such as CA Inc., IBM or Hewlett-Packard Co.

At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco this week, GroundWork and a handful of other upstart vendors tried to capture a share of the systems management spotlight.

For example, Austin-based FiveRuns Corp. announced its first product: software that can manage servers running Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X as well as open-source applications such as MySQL, JBoss, Apache and Tomcat. And San Francisco-based Hyperic Inc. said its open-source systems management tools have been downloaded more than 10,000 times since they were released two months ago.

Michael Cote, an analyst at Denver-based consulting firm RedMonk, said enterprise systems management installations typically scale to cover thousands of devices and applications. But the result "is usually a very long and expensive project," he said.