The Performance Management Vendor Lineup: Who Manages What?

Lots of vendors support infrastructure performance management (IPM) or application performance management (APM) as defined in our previous postings.  At the risk of taking a few arrows, we have assigned vendors to the aspect of performance management upon which their products focus.  Although admittedly incomplete, the following representative list attributes at least 10 product vendors to each bucket.  Yes, some vendors do provide a few features that can be viewed as also delivering aspects of the other view, but we felt it justifiable to assign each vendor to the bucket where their offering is strongest.

IPM
AdventNet
Castle Rock Computing
InfoVista
Ipswitch
Kaseya
ManageEngine
NetIQ
Netmon
Nimsoft
Oblicore
Xangati

APM
Auditec
Centrisoft
Compuware
Coradiant
Knoa Software
Macro 4
NetQoS
NetScout
OPNET Technologies
SeaNet Technologies
Symphoniq

The first thing we notice about the two buckets is that they hold well established companies and new players.  This is still a dynamic industry with plenty of room for innovation.  Since there are equal numbers of both types of tools, if you haven't yet, you will probably buy at least one of each.

We recently surveyed enterprise IT managers and asked which tools they currently use.  On average, the typical enterprise has four management products in place, with 16% of enterprises reporting that they had eight or more products in production!

There is a small cadre of vendors that supplies both IPM and APM as shown below.  These are typically referred to as the "Big Four" of IT management.

Both IPM and APM
BMC
CA
HP
IBM

These mega players are basically enterprise management platforms that began life to manage infrastructure.  They deliver excellent IPM over a very broad range of infrastructure technologies, however, an enterprise still needs to buy the element management software for each technology they own because that is how they can actually fix problems.

All of the Big Four add APM capability by acquiring niche products.  In most cases they purchased several companies - plus they integrate critical APM components from partners.  The net effect is that the two critical performance management views are poorly integrated.  Often you must buy three or so products to do the job: IPM, APM, and then an integration platform on which they operate. 

And in most cases, IPM and APM products are even sold under different brands with separate sales teams!  If you contact the Big Four or visit them at a trade show booth (which is always huge and hard to miss) you will first get the IPM pitch.  Whenever we ask about their APM products, we get an "oh yes, I think we do that too but those folks are not here" response.  APM is still the second-class citizen in these vendors' organizations.

Fundamentally the "we do it all" vendors have strong IPM capabilities, but are still learning the APM ropes.  In our view this means there is ample room in the marketplace for nimble APM pure-play vendors.  As a result, we predict that the performance management marketplace is about to get very interesting.

• Network Management
• application performance
• BMC
• CA
• HP
• IBM