By Elisabeth Horwitt and John McConnell
Network World, 5/8/95

Chalk up a Pyrrhic victory for Bill Branson.

As a senior network engineer at Frank Russell Co. in Tacoma, Wash., he persuaded top executives for the second year running to approve substantial funding for network management tools.

But now Branson, like many of his peers questioned in a recent Network World net management satisfaction survey, must sift through a mediocre lot of network management platforms that fall well short of meeting user needs for providing an enterprise-class net management service.

"I'd spend a great deal of money on a platform that solved our needs, even if it was nonstandard," Branson says. "But I don't see it out there."

Branson is hardly alone in his frustration with today's network management offerings. A recent survey of 223 network managers conducted for NW by McConnell Consulting, Inc. reveals rising dissatisfaction among users - 28% rated Simple Network Management Protocol platforms as only adequate, and 48% rated them somewhat satisfactory. Almost across the board, SNMP management platforms and related applications scored no better than they did in NW's 1994 survey.

The results express users' unfulfilled expectations that management platforms would, by now, have become effective vehicles for integrating management applications. What troubles survey participants is that platform vendors are positioning their products as the centerpiece for integrating network management applications and automating common processes. The trouble is, few vendors have risen above the rhetoric to deliver on those promises.

For example, survey respondents singled out data sharing among management applications as a sorely needed platform improvement. Users rated it an 8.5 out of a possible 10 as a key improvement that would raise their satisfaction of SNMP platforms.

A data repository, however, is but one step toward users' overall goal of making network management less technically complex, time-consuming and people-intensive, according to users. Respondents indicated they would like vendors to also focus future investments on automation and domain management facilities.

"I want integrated management applications," Branson says. "I want tools simpler so help desk and operations people can use them. And I want automated tools that can pore through a lot of packets and identify problems that would take a human operator hours to figure out. One hundred people with [Network General Corp.] Sniffers can't do what automated protocol analysis software does."

Holly Karr, a technical consultant at Cummins Engine, Inc. in Columbus, Ind., agrees, adding that users need integrated tool sets that will allow for a higher degree of automation.

"Network management is a very large and very complex job, and people who are needed to manage this environment are not available, or they're expensive, Karr says. So we've got to automate a lot of this process to make it affordable."

The kinds of management procedures that users, such as Karr, want to see automated generally comprise a series of steps, each involving a different management tool or application, often from different vendors.

Unfortunately, the available tools to build and implement automated sequences are inadequate at best, according to the survey. Systems management platforms scored 3.75 out of a possible 5 for their ability to deliver application integration; 3.6 for automation; and 3.5 for multiprotocol management.

Management applications also received tepid satisfaction ratings from survey respondents. Problem management products received a satisfaction rating of 3.4, barely up from the previous year. Security, multiprotocol management, desktop and configuration management had similar scores. Software distribution and inventory management wallowed at the bottom of the heap, with ratings of 3.3 and 3.2, respectively.

Right now, products such as IBM's NetView for AIX provide application program interfaces (API) to let third-party applications access their services. However, the cost of rewriting applications to work with each platform has discouraged independent software vendors (ISV) from supporting more than a lowest common denominator of platform services, says Leo Cole, manager of SystemView Enterprise Management Technology at IBM.

Integration of applications on a network management platform commonly means that they can all be launched from the same graphical user interface (GUI) by clicking on an icon. Management tools still lack a common look and feel, which means network administrators must be retrained to operate each one.

Furthermore, "application suites from framework vendors and ISVs are disparate: They don't talk, they store data differently, so there is no cross-correlation of data," says Frank Belland, a senior communications consultant at Lockheed Martin Corp. This means that network administrators end up having to "reinvent the wheel a thousand times" by developing applications that can translate the data into a meaningful report or an event that kicks off a response from a particular management tool, he adds.

The major platform vendors all say they are willing to support standardized APIs and object definitions as a means to take the integration burden off their customers. Their recent behavior, however, indicates otherwise.

"Vendor marketeers see the concept of common APIs as good cocktail conversation," Belland says. "They talk standards, but they don't mean it. Even SNMP is a base standard to which everyone adds proprietary extensions: If you don't know a vendor's secret [Management Information Base], you can't talk to its device. That's not open, is it?"

There are two possible scenarios for the management industry to fulfill users' integration needs, says Bob Emerson, telecommunications and common technology business manager at Hewlett-Packard Co.'s net and systems management division. "First, one vendor dominates [and creates de facto standards]; second, an unbiased body - a Management Integration Consortium or Open Software Foundation, Inc. - agrees on API standards, he said.

Right now, vendors seem more intent on the first scenario than on the second. The major management platform vendors withdrew recently from MIC, effectively killing, or at least crippling, that particular effort to define a standardized management data repository.

The platform vendors are now discussing how to come up with standardized APIs for the repository and other key management components via a more formal standards body than MIC, such as the OSF or Network Management (NM) Forum, IBM's Cole says.

However, this offers little hope to users who have seen formal standards efforts - such as the OSF's Distributed Management Environment and the NM Forum's Common Management Information Protocol-based protocols - die a lingering death. Meanwhile, leading vendors are aggressively promoting their own protocols as either formal or de facto standards. IBM, for instance, is working with Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Digital Equipment Corp. to get its own APIs adopted by organizations such as X/Open Company, Ltd., Cole says. Meanwhile, HP has been pushing its own Metaschema repository architecture through a partners program.

Pragmatic users, however, say they would willingly forego a formal standards process if vendors would agree to some common management protocols.

"Sometime in the next six months, a couple of vendors will make [data repository architecture] announcements, and whether other vendors jump on that bandwagon will depend on their marketing perception of how it is received by the end-user community," Belland says. "It's up to users to drive a stake in the ground and say, 'This is good; we can use this.' "

Many users are looking to the next generation of network management platforms - HP's Tornado, IBM's Karat and Sun's Solstice. Such platforms are expected to deliver by next year a slew of effective - albeit proprietary - application integration tools, including object-oriented data repositories and GUIs; better automation tools; and common APIs.

They are also supposed to support distributed client/ server architectures in which multiple domain management systems can exchange information and hand off management responsibilities to one another.

A distributed architecture would finally provide vendors' platforms with the scalability to do enterprisewide management, Belland says. "You cannot accurately or realistically manage a large corporate network without moving to a domain-based distributed architecture. There is no [computing] engine big enough today."

Survey respondents gave systems management platforms a satisfaction rating of 3.7 on scalability, down from 3.9 in the previous year. Users also rated various management services offered by systems management platforms.

Frameworks phenomenon

However, based on survey data, such offerings have a way to go before they satisfy users. Only 20% of respondents said they were currently using systems management frameworks. And overall satisfaction with the products was a mediocre 3.7, or about the same as last year.

Users rated their satisfaction with the frameworks' application integration at 3.75, up only a quarter of a point from the 1994 survey. Survey participants rated a number of features and improvements that would raise their satisfaction with systems management platforms.

A promising development during the past year is the alliances between the two sectors: IBM's NetView for AIX with Novell, Inc.'s NetWare Management System; HP's OpenView with LEGENT's AgentWorks and CA's Unicenter. Such partnerships are producing connections that enable a network management and a systems management platform to exchange alerts, topological or configuration data.

According to American Greetings Corp., it hopes most of its management needs will be met by an integrated combination of HP's Tornado and LEGENT's host- and client/server-based systems management tools. "I believe either they have what I am looking for or it will soon be available," says David Ward, manager of worldwide network operations for the Cleveland firm.

On the other hand, some companies are concerned that choosing a proprietary management platform will tie them too tightly to one vendor, limiting their ability to jump ship if a better solution comes along in a year or two.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Colorado has been using IBM's NetView for AIX and has seen some progress on the integration front, says Ken Shirane, a systems programmer for the health care provider. "You can now actually mesh data from different routers or hubs," he says.

However, Shirane says he was less confident that IBM would provide adequate integration of applications such as trouble ticketing and asset management. While the platform "seems adequate at this point, we would like to see integration of applications like trouble ticketing and asset management," he adds.

The health care provider is also looking at systems management suites from CA and LEGENT. "Free choice is very important: It's kind of a drag to be stuck with one vendor," Shirane says.

McDonald's Corp. is just one of many companies resigned to using "multiple network management platforms since all the applications you need won't run on any one platform," says Michael Disabato, manager of strategic planning and network systems at the Oakbrook, Ill.-based fast-food chain.

However, this makes it "extremely important to be able to link the different platforms," Disabato says. "APIs would be best, but I doubt those guys will be able to agree." A common database structure is the more likely future vehicle for sharing data across platforms, he adds.

Lockheed Martin is leaning heavily toward using HP's Tornado as its strategic platform but is still keeping its options open in case another platform turns out to offer crucial tools or features in the coming years, Belland says. The manufacturer currently has several of the major platforms running in-house.

Another major user concern right now is how long it will take vendors to deliver on their promises, particularly since products such as Tornado have had their delivery dates slip significantly during the past few months.

"Major vendors like HP and IBM have the right vision and, obviously, will be rolling out pieces of it" soon, says Cummins Engine's Karr. "But it will be three to five years before we see a real total solution."

Cummins Engine, currently a user of NetView for AIX, can't wait that long to start fulfilling its integrated management needs, she adds. "So we're piecing things together, and key pieces of integration that we absolutely need, we're developing ourselves. However, we don't want to have to keep doing this for the long term."