Last November, I wrote a post entitled “The Free Willies”.  In it I confessed my reservations about diverting scarce R&D resources to develop free utilities.

One of the challenges as a product manager is to determine how much functionality to include in afree utility without cannibalizing our commercial products.  In the case of ConfigCheck, I decided that it should test ESX host’s security compliance based on VMware’s Infrastructure 3 Security Guide.  Tens of housands of people have download and used ConfigCheck, and we frequently get feedback about its value.  Some users have requested that we enhance ConfigCheck to support CIS and DISA standards as well as VMware’s security guide.  However, I am unlikely to add CIS and DISA support  as I walk the balance between offering real value in a free utility and offering significantly more value in our commercial product, Tripwire Enterprise which supports CIS and DISA standards as well as the ability to tailor tests, manage waivers for failed tests, and more.

Next week we will launch another free virtualization utility.  Like ConfigCheck, the new utility will offer significant value.  However, I want to make sure we leave some headroom for future commercial products.  Any way you look at it, decent free utilities offer pretty good bang for the buck.

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