FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

GroundWork Announces 100th Subscription to GroundWork Monitor
in First Full Year of Operations

Company's Rapid Growth Underscores Deeply Underserved
Open Source IT Management Market

Emeryville, CA — January 17, 2006 — Underscoring a deeply underserved market for open source IT management solutions, GroundWork Open Source Solutions, Inc., a leader in open source IT management solutions, today announced a number of major company achievements for 2005--the company's first full year of operations. In addition to securing its 100th subscriber of the company's flagship product, GroundWork Monitor, GroundWork expanded its executive team; secured $8.5 million from Mayfield and Canaan Partners; introduced a major update of GroundWork Monitor; launched three open source projects; and formed strategic partnerships with Novell and Palamida. Given its significant growth, the company says 2006 will focus on aggressive channel development and overseas expansion as well as continued product development and additional open source projects.

"Not surprisingly, we're finding more and more companies are interested in a solution that allows them to quickly gain wide coverage and control of their network, systems and applications while enjoying the cost advantages of open source," said Ranga Rangachari, CEO of GroundWork. "Commercial alternatives have long been characterized by interminable deployment cycles and prohibitive costs--and companies are hungry for this new level of time-to-value."

Expanded Executive Team

In July, GroundWork named Ranga Rangachari as the company's president and CEO. Rangachari brought with him deep experience from his tenure with other high-profile enterprise software companies that improve IT efficiency including Invio Software, where he served as president and CEO, and Legato Systems, a leader in storage management. Earlier in the year, GroundWork named Phil Bradley as Vice President of Sales. Bradley has more than 20 years of sales and management experience with software companies including nCircle, Inktomi and Documentum.

Closed 100th Subscription to GroundWork Monitor

By year-end, GroundWork had introduced its 100th customer to the benefits of GroundWork Monitor, the leading open source IT management solution. New customers came from a variety of industries including manufacturing, government, financial services, education, construction, energy and high technology.

Closed Series B Financing From Top Tier Investors

In March, GroundWork secured $8.5 million in financing. The Series B financing was led by Mayfield as well as Series A lead investor Canaan Partners.

Launched New Version of GroundWork Monitor

In October, GroundWork launched GroundWork Monitor 4.0, a major new release of its open source-based IT monitoring solution. GroundWork Monitor's $16,000 annual subscription offers the right balance of simplicity, performance and affordability in a fully supported solution, while the solution's new architecture provides a platform for a comprehensive open source IT management suite.

Launched Three Open Source Projects

In the second half of the year, GroundWork launched three separate open source projects--each of which was an integral component of GroundWork Monitor 4.0. Collectively, the three open source projects have already been downloaded 15,000 times.

• GroundWork Status Viewer offers a new user interface for displaying monitoring status data from Nagios, an open source monitoring project, and other monitoring tools
• GroundWork Foundation provides a middleware layer that captures and normalizes monitoring data from disparate open and closed source tools
• GroundWork Monitor Architect offers a powerful configuration tool and device profile library that simplifies the task of configuring an enterprise-class monitoring system

Inked Strategic Partnerships

In August, GroundWork was named as one of six open source application providers to participate in Novell's Market Start program, which gives GroundWork access to Novell's worldwide distribution channels and extensive marketing and support infrastructure. GroundWork also joined with Palamida to announce its commitment to intellectual property transparency by being among the first commercial software vendors to fully disclose the IP components included in their software products.

Awards and Speaking Engagements

In addition to being one of only four companies named as the "Ones to Watch" by Open Source Business Conference in April, GroundWork executives were also invited to speak at a number of industry events throughout the year, including LinuxWorld San Francisco, Interop New York, OSBC and ApacheCon U.S. '05.

About GroundWork Open Source Solutions

GroundWork Open Source Solutions, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com) develops, integrates and enhances leading open source software to deliver comprehensive open source IT monitoring solutions. With GroundWork solutions, enterprises leverage the flexibility and low cost of open source tools to achieve enterprise-level availability, performance and operational efficiency at a fraction of the cost of commercial software. GroundWork is based in Emeryville, Calif. and its investors include Mayfield and Canaan Partners.

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