I'm beginning to think the folks at Zenoss never sleep. How else can the popular open source network monitoring software vendor explain all the recent announcements and news they've been making the last few days? Let's start with the contest.

The new Community ZenPack Contest captures the cloud computing craze. "Zenoss in the Clouds ZenPack Contest" is aimed at users who want to create modules, or ZenPacks, to allow Zenoss to monitor cloud infrastructureand service providers, or deploy cloud-based technologies.

While the ten hopeful finalists in the Cisco "Think Inside the Box" developer competition await the judges' decision, OStatic has been fortunate enough to speak with a few teams about their submissions. The global contest centered on the "network as a platform" approach to develop applications using Cisco's Linux-based AXP (Application Extension Platform), a service module on its ISR (Integrated Services Routers).

Today, Roman Skvirsky of Team RSDevs has graciously taken the time to tell OStatic readers a little bit more about his Flash Gateway to Videoconferences application. The Flash Gateway to Videoconferences allows users to connect and join conferences and audio calls to H.323 and SIP phones through a web browser -- requiring no additional software installation beyond the Flash plugin.

In June, Cisco announced the ten finalists in its "Think Inside the Box" developer competition. The global contest centered on the "network as a platform" philosophy, and asked applicants to develop applications using Cisco's Linux-based AXP (Application Extension Platform), a module on its ISR (Integrated Services Routers).

The contest drew nearly 900 hopeful development teams from 75 countries. After many long hours of deliberation, the 110 qualifying teams were whittled down to 10 finalists.

OStatic has been fortunate enough to talk to a few of these finalist teams -- including Toshiyuki Sakata, from Team CampUser. CampUser, based in Brazil, developed its Locker for IP Telephony application to help network administrators maximize their organization's operational efficiency and billing policy administration through call authorization profiles and call management processing.