Is this an indication that the big bad wolf, who wanted to eat (and presumably spit out) open source has changed its mind?
Microsoft wants to become a major systems management player -- that's no surprise, considering how it has grown Systems Center over the years. But you gotta love how Microsoft plans to do so by relying on the OpenPegasus project, an open source implementation of the Distributed Management Task Force’s (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM) and Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards.
Note that, as part of this announcement Microsoft said it will be joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee. Not only will it contribute code back to the open source community, it will do so under its own Microsoft Public License -- which, to be fair, is an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license.
Looks as if Microsoft is inching in the right direction with open source -- slowly cooperating more and saber rattling less. Next step would be to kill its own forms of open-source licenses. But the company makes most of its living selling software. It needs time to move itself toward this brave new era where software is free and service/support is not. Everyone else needs time to see if Microsoft will become a trustworthy member of this new world.
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Microsoft: a game changer for ITIM?
Managed Objects' own Jim White wonders if Microsoft will be a “game changer” in the IT management space. In a blog post on this story he comments to the effect “there is little doubt Microsoft’s move will make ripples in the market,” and if Microsoft is truly making a “serious commitment to IT management, there is a high probability for success. That success will likely come at the expense of incumbent vendors – mainly by way of taking market share from the Big 4.” However, he doesn’t seem to think success is necessarily guaranteed as there are “market dynamics and competitive factors that will influence how – and how quickly – Microsoft’s initiative evolves.”
Here's a link to his post: http://www.wearebsm.com/managed_objects/2008/04/microsoft-goes-open-source-a-g.html
Maybe but it's still a long way
I have followed MS going to OpenPegasus (and DMTF) a while now. Yes, they have a very good group, etc for it but they don't have the resistance only from outside but from inside also as far as I have seen. Good luck, I believe that if they overcome the political problems, they can in a couple of years be a player. Not dominating, others have been longer on this, stagnated for a while but can get to speed very fast again, assuming big companies can ever be "fast". And DMTF (CIM, whatever) will be better for systems management than previous, very old, architectures.
Another "Me Too" Play?
While I believe that Microsoft will certainly have impact in the system management market, their announced plans are still not going to help solve the real issues facing Operations teams in managing the performance of mission critical IT systems. The announced plans are a "me too" play in a changing environment. It is well established that the complexity and size of today's data centers have led to huge labor costs for performance management because Operations teams continue to take the approach of throwing more bodies at the problem. They are using static-threshold based monitoring and tribal knowledge-based, human correlation to solve problems in an environment with thousands of devices and hundreds of thousands of performance metrics. The problem is humanly unsolveable and more and more IT Operations executives have realized this and are looking at a new approach. Real time analytics solutions are now available that can automate much of the manual effort that goes into performance management and even predict performance problems so that they can be prevented before they occur. If Microsoft had announced plans to provide this type of capability (which has been ignored by the Big 4, with the exception of BMC's acquisition of Proactivenet) in addition to standard monitoring, I would have been much more impressed with their foray into heterogenous system performance management.
And Me Too
Steve, you are absolutely correct and it is partly vendor and customer problem together. As you said, it is much too common to throw more bodies against a performance hot spot (or security problem or whatever) - I did see that a couple a weeks ago in a huge telco installation. Now, MS is taking first steps on road "you can't manage what you can't measure" and we have to wait where it goes. The good part is that the technology they use (hope not misuse!) will make monitoring and acting to results much easier from technical point of view. Does this work for performance, capacity, security, etc - not yet and MS reputation is not very good currently thinking a wider picture but we can hope it changes. It will change if enough customers require it also but will create nice turf wars in corporations. Let's see and hope.