Company History

Our Vision

We aim for op5 to become the natural choice for the best overall control of all types of IT environments.

Our Mission

Our mission is to deliver a user friendly, flexible and cost effective solutions. We want to attract the best set of people to work for us and combine that with openness to our customers and our community relationships. We focus all our energy on developing the best and most powerful IT monitoring solution for the enterprise market.

Our Company Background

As with the stories behind many other companies, op5 sprang from a problem and in this case, two innovative individuals seeing the problem as an opportunity. The problem included two important components: Technology and Money, i.e. basic drivers for any technology start-up.

Active in the booming Telecom industry, in early 2001 Jan Josephson and Fredrik Åkerström was involved in a large network management project using a very large, complex and expensive solution for monitoring that had been sold on a “vision” of what “can” be done. With the experience of frustrating large-scale projects behind them they felt there needed to be better and more efficient solutions out there. So they took the challenge to find a solution that was going to be easy to use, that can handle most of what the large framework monitoring systems claim they can do, to a reasonable price.

In the search for a cheap yet powerful solution they found the Open Source Project Nagios* (back then called NetSaint) developed by Ethan Galstad. By using the “core” and combining that with different community developed plug-ins and add-on’s they managed to build a functional network monitoring solution that fulfilled the customers needs. Jan and Fredrik started a consultancy company in 2001 to sell, install and manage the solution.

They continued to develop the solution as enterprise specific features was added, such as making it faster to install, easier to use and to scale to handle large IT-environments. It also became apparent that the Open Source solution was missing vital pieces to be really attractive for enterprise usage. The customers wanted support and guarantees, a structured road map for the development, ease of use and better reports to name a few early features.

The name op5

We often get the question: where does the name op5 come from? The name op5 could stand for many smart “abbreviations” and we have heard many theories such as operation 5, OPen Source, OPeration Management etc… but the truth is that its much more simple and trivial than that. Jan and Fredrik decided to participate in an IT Fair called IT Expo in Gothenburg to show the new product for the market and they did not have a name yet for the company or the product, so they could not even fill out the application form. Several suggestions were sent to the authorities but was rejected due to trademark in the last-minute. In despair and lack of time Jan was at the time reading a book with a character working at a secret division of the Swedish Military called the op5 division. In a last attempt to get a name this became the suggestion that was accepted by the authorities. Now many years later we think it’s a great name, short, cool and international.

op5 is established

op5 AB is established as a company in early 2004 as the number of customers grew and took more and more resources and time from the rest of the consultancy business. The duo took the decision to focus on building a product development company not a consultancy company. This was an important decision as it was perceived as an odd decision back then and even today we get many comments on why not make money in the open-source consultancy business? We believed back then and still do that it is for the customers long-term best interest to assure that we focus on creating the best monitoring product and by such minimizing consultancy needs and support. It also means that we can make professional manuals, maintain high quality support etc. In short it helps us to keep our focus. At the same time our solutions are open and any customer who wants to tweak, customize or integrate can do so.

The first..

customer was a small service provider and they are still our costumer today:)
real employee (as in when you go outside your closesed friends scope) was Andreas Eriksson, senior developer and he is still our senior developer:)
external visit at the first op5 office – was a man who thought he was at a strip club? Our first office was in a basement and the strip club was in the next building so he was not totally wrong:)
Logo
op5 Monitor release 1.0 was 1st of september 2003
external Venture Capital: KTH Seed Capital

The future

We believe we are in very exciting times for our part of the IT industry. New major trends such as virtualization, outsourcing, cloud computing mixed with smartphones, Ipads, B2B apps makes overall IT services control and quality an even more challenging task then ever before. Being a focused product vendor with a sole focus on helping our customers to achieve quality uptime is indeed very fun as we deliver instant customer satisfaction and value. Our challenges are classical company growth challenges. Our customers are getting more international, we see business growing fast in Europe and in the US and as such we need assure best possible quality delivery. This includes professional support and access to the best local business partners.