Network mgmt. no cakewalk

By Robin Schreier Hohman
Network World, 08/31/98

Network management platforms should make life easier by helping companies identify problems before they get out of hand. But try telling that to customers who struggle with these products day in and day out.

Packages such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, Cabletron's Spectrum, Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG and Tivoli's TME are supposed to track everything from device throughput to application performance. But users say the sheer complexity of these packages has led to frustration, severe underutilization and, in some cases, total abandonment.

A recent Gartner Group study found that 18 months after deployment, 70% of enterprise management software implementations were deemed failures. At three years after deployment, the failure rate rose to 75%. The study considered implementation a failure if the company did not achieve expectations

or return on investment goals, says Ray Paquet, research director at Gartner Group.

The reasons for failure? Paquet says there are many:

The tools don't work out of the box.
The packages are expensive, so return on investment is hard to achieve.
The packages are highly customizable and therefore extremely difficult to implement.
User expectations are too high.

Executive surveys have consistently shown that systems and network management has been among the top five concerns for the past four to five years, Paquet says, adding that there hasn't been a corresponding increase in planning and budgeting for the appropriate tools.

While executives can be convinced to pay top dollar for management software, they're not usually as accommodating when it comes to funding the planning and implementation stages.

"You've got to look at this as a life cycle," Paquet advises. While vendors are great at explaining all the nifty things the software can do, they're not always as clear about what it can't do.

"Don't assume that you can do a whole lot right out of the box other than using SNMP to poll the network and maybe draw a picture," says David Passmore, president of NetReference, a Herndon, Va., consulting firm.

The problem with packages such as HP OpenView is they take a substantial amount of work to implement, says Peter Pawlak, manager of distributed computing at Alaska Airlines in Seattle. Alaska Airlines bought OpenView more than two years ago. "OpenView got installed, it discovered the nodes on the network, and that was the extent of it," he says. "The amount of work it took to go through and really identify and customize the thresholds, limits and items that you really wanted it to respond to is something that no one had the time for."

He estimates his company uses about 10% of OpenView's capabilities, but he is planning to use more of the package's features in the next few months.

At least one other user has had similar problems with the OpenView package.

"The biggest problem with OpenView is it tries to be everything to everyone, and it ends up being little to anybody," says one network manager who declined to be identified.

His problems with OpenView started right away. "Installation? Boy, you really have to have your coffee that day," he says. His firm initially spent about $50,000 for OpenView, which is not really a lot in this market. Then for three months the company paid a consultant who eventually decided there was something wrong with the company's switches. Finally, the network manager went to OpenView class for a week and was able to fix the problem "in 15 minutes," he says.

After he fired the consultant, the network manager turned to Ipswich Software's WhatsUpGold, a $795 network management package that doesn't have near the functionality of OpenView - something he sees as a good thing. You can't run policy-based management, quality of service and other sophisticated management tasks with WhatsUp Gold, but you don't pay $50,000 for it either, he says.

Derek Weeks, senior business developer for the OpenView Business Unit, says he always tells customers the software cost is just a beginning. "I make it very clear to the customers that this is what they have to look at in terms of costs of implementing a solution," he says.

Enter the experts

Experts say this is where the burgeoning professional services industry comes in. For a hefty fee, independent consultants, or those belonging to a vendor's professional services division, will come to a company and get the management software to do what it's supposed to.

In fact, Computer Associates estimates customers pay between $7 and $10 in professional services to support the package for every $1 they pay for Unicenter TNG, says Chris Wagner, executive vice president of CA Global Professional Services.

Even worse, management software companies are now reaping huge profits from the professional services business, says Judith Hurwitz, president of The Hurwitz Group, a Framingham, Mass., consultancy. Hurwitz sees it as a rip-off.

"The growth in the professional services industry is indicative of a collective failure in the software industry," she says.

For every dollar in software costs, companies spend at least $3 to $5 on services, Hurwitz estimates. Users "should not be putting up with that; it's not acceptable," she says.

Gartner Group's Paquet says Hurwitz's estimate is conservative.

The purchase price is, in a best-case scenario, 20% of the total cost of ownership, and 5% in the worst case, Paquet says. "For every $1 million customers spend on software, be prepared to spend $10 million more in support costs, not including the cost of the organization and operations," he says.

For Kevin Hamilton, chief information officer at Media News Technologies, a newspaper group in Denver, Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG worked out just fine. Hamilton says it took him five days to get it installed and configured.

"They sent out one of their engineers to do it, and there was nothing to do because it was done," he says.

In part, Hamilton attributes his easy installation to the four months he spent drawing up schematics to plan for it.

But what about network managers who simply don't have the time? "You have to make the time," he emphasizes, "even if it means coming in on the weekends or working at three or four in the morning." You're not going to see a return on investment if you don't put in the time upfront, he says.

But Hamilton is not your typical net management user. He has become such a whiz at Unicenter TNG that he's struck a deal with Computer Associates to write the Unicenter agents for Microsoft Site Server.

Richard Weiss, architect for enterprise management systems at Charles Schwab & Co. in San Francisco, uses HP OpenView for network management and Tivoli TME for systems management.

While he says he's gotten a good return on investment from both products, Weiss estimates it took about three years to get each running up to speed "We didn't think it was going to require as much upfront and ongoing work," he says.

You don't get what you pay for

Rich Ptak, director of systems management research at D.H. Brown Associates in Amherst, N.H., estimates about 30% of net management implementations are fully utilized. Even when people use the net management software, very often they use it to monitor their networks, not to manage their networks.

"Things have got to be made simpler, yet at the same time it's got to be something that gives you capabilities right out of the box," Ptak says.

That's not easy. "The message is, if you're going to buy one of these packages, be prepared to spend a lot of time with it," NetReference's Passmore says.

Gartner Group's Paquet likens implementing a successful management system to baking a cake. "If you wanted to bake the best cake in the world, I'd hire the best chef," he says. The same is true when choosing a management platform. Realistic, long-term planning with the right people "is much more important than whether they use OpenView or Unicenter or Spectrum," he says.

Media News' Hamilton says he spent at least $100,000 on Unicenter TNG and calls making that kind of decision "terrifying, because you're convincing your chief financial officer that this is going to do what it says it does.

"You're selling them a dream, and you're hoping that it becomes a reality," he says.