CFEngine AS, the Norwegian outfit with the popular eponymous open source configuration and compliance management widgetry for automating distributed infrastructure, has moved its sales operation to the Palo Alto in hopes of turning its freeloading Fortune 1000 accounts into paying customers.

Its first job will be to identify the big companies using its free software that haven't taken a subscription yet. Its cross-platform commercial stuff, just upgraded to CFEngine 3 Nova, costs $250 per server.

The new rev is supposed to give system administrators more control over constantly changing, increasingly complex IT infrastructure.

CFEngine, a decentralized autonomous agent technology¸ can reportedly continuously monitor, self-repair and update the IT infrastructure of a global multi-site enterprise in minutes, with negligible impact on system resources or performance. Facebook, AT&T, Cisco, eBay, LinkedIn, AMD, the US Navy and five of the 10 largest banks on Wall Street use it to manage servers, desktops and other heterogeneous computing devices.

The biggest difference in 3 Nova is a new report-producing GUI built with large organizations in mind. It's supposed to turn out custom IT metrics weighted specifically to an organization's business goals. It has also added native support for Windows and mission-critical high availability and improved its Xen and KVM hypervisor integration.

CFEngine 3 Nova runs on Linux, Unix, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh.

The company, which recently took in $4.5 million in venture capital so it can stop bootstrapping, competes against BMC and HP. It was profitable in the first half.