RE: Frameworks vs. point products

The small guys had the better ideas and the better products, for network savvy engineers that did their own bake-off tests in their own labs. Each one got a bit too scary for the big guys, so they bought them, swallowed them up whole, and eliminated the competiton.
Each one of these good products that were headed in the right direction, and had a loyal base of customers, were ruined by the big guys that ate them up. EMC screwed up Smarts, IBM is screwing up MicroMuse, etc.
When you take a deep look at the "framework" products the big guys offer, it is really a mish-mash of many different products and technologies all stitched together into a big expensive, complex, unwieldy beast that requires an entire staff to administrate.

When will these big guys (IBM, HP, EMC, CA, etc.)wake up? They are like the Detroit automakers, they just cant change, the inertia is just to great, instead they will just continue to produce their stodgy old Detroit irons.

If a good startup would resist the temptattion of the big money, and resist being bought out by the big guys, they could take a big chunk of the market by doing things efficiently and intelligently.

I have always put in a series of best of breed application / system / network management products regardless of what the Framework vendors have offered.

Anyone who tried to get a full framework implementation in place across a large enterprise knows it's an exercise in futility. At the end of the day, all management SW is plumbing, and trying to justify the spend for a full framework installation is extremely difficult.

The vendors have always treated their products as a straightforward means of account control. They know that the cost & pain of replacing an installed solution is usually so steep that few people do it.

I recommend that customers roll their own "frameworks" and work to control the presentation layer w/ Business Service Management SW on the top. That way you can go back to your existing vendors and tell them truthfully that their "plumbing" is now invisible to your users and you can remove / replace it. It's the only way I have ever found to get leverage in this space.

The big gorillas may be confusing managing a service portfolio with managing customer needs. As thier catalog of products & services swell to the point of obesity, thier solution is more about re-branding, maximizing revenue and account control...to the point where some of them sell products to help customers navigate through their own catalogs or obtain a price.

The channels of course get screwed up too, which can make even more of a mess; I know of situations where the partner sells the 'old' (that's what they're staff is familiar with) laying the groundwork for an upgrade. Beautiful (but from whose perspective?)

Who ever said every tool had to last forever anyway? If you believe in the service Lifecyle, then surely a tool has a birth, life and (hopefully) an exit strategy.

While it's nice to have an integrated ITSM suite, some common sense is in order. What IS integration, how long must you wait to get it, and how it will really benefit you are all pretty logical questions...

I'm for the little guy, or maybe a swift kick in the SaaS is in order....

I agree. It seems that users have forgotten that a framework is ( should be ) their business, not owned by CA, IBM, HP, etc. Fortunately it seems the trend is changing, more and more users are looking solutions which will support their business model instead of looking how to change their business to support some vendor "framework". That way even a large vendor system comes to point product, some are good but there is no way they can solve all problems to everyone. So, we need independent products and if the vendor "framework" is not open / standards based
it will be a dead end for user, sooner or later.