Big 4 management vendors squeak by with a passing grade, garner little confidence from Gartner attendees

If IT infrastructure and operations management specialists could hand out report cards to BMC, CA, HP and IBM, the comment they might include would be: "Shows slight improvement."

An impromptu poll of more than 355 attendees (exact number of responses were difficult to calculate on-the-fly) at the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit in Orlando Monday showed that 50% of attendees in the keynote session would give the market-leading big four management vendors a grade of C. Some 17% gave the big four a D grade, 4% determined they deserved an F and 15% offered the "incomplete" option. One percent said the market leaders deserved an A and 14% gave them a B.

At a 2006 data center conference, Gartner found when it surveyed 640 IT buyers that more than 40% of respondents gave the incumbent market leaders a C grade, while nearly 30% suggested the vendors' perforance to be closer to a D average.

"Last year, they earned a C- so a C is an improvement," said Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, during her keynote presentation.

Considering the big four management vendors make up about 60% of the $13 billion market -- which Scott says is very fragmentated with 40% market share up for grabs -- BMC, CA, HP and IBM must consume start-up contenders while avoiding attacks from the sharks looking to get a piece of the management market. These sharks are other large high-tech vendors Cisco, EMC, Microsoft and Oracle, which see the opportunity to grow their business by adding management technologies to their portfolios. Scott discussed how the big vendors have acquired so much technology they are now focusing on integrating their product portfolios and looking to offer what Gartner says is the next generation of IT management software: ERP for IT.

Scott detailed the first phase as Framework 1.0, in which vendors offered event management and event correlation tools. Framework 2.0, the current phase, involves more IT process automation and focuses on integrating technologies to maximize hardware and software assets. And Framework 3.0, or ERP for IT, will be a "long road" away and entail the functional integration between IT and the business.

Scott asked attendees in another quick poll which vendor they had the most confidence in achieving this goal of ERP for IT. Here are the results:

BMC: 16%

CA: 4%

HP: 20%

IBM: 16%

Microsoft: 8%

Oracle: 4%

EMC: 4%

Other: 5%

None of the above: 23%

Placing second behind 'none of the above' could be taken as a negative, but HP with its reinvigorated push on its software business clearly has made an impact at least on attendees at this conference.

• BMC
• CA
• Gartner
• HP
• IBM
• management software