While network equipment makers have reinforced the management elements in their routers, switches, accelerators and voice equipment, customers still want more.

Hardware vendors have long supplemented their gear with management applications - take CiscoWorks, for example - but industry watchers say the trend is to make gear easier to manage alongside competitive hardware and by third-party software applications such as CA Unicenter, HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli.

Companies such as Avaya, Cisco, Citrix, Extreme Networks and Nortel are upgrading their management offerings. For example, Avaya and Extreme last year integrated their respective Avaya Integrated Management and EPICenter products, and later this year are expected to release software upgrades for Avaya IP phones and Extreme LAN switches that will let Extreme switches discover and self-configure network settings for Avaya IP phones plugged into an Extreme LAN port. The discovery process will use Link Layer Discovery Protocol and 802.1X authentication, allowing Avaya IP phones to be authenticated and secured, and to receive the proper QoS settings on the Extreme switch.

"There has been such a long history of difficult deployments on the management software side that more hardware vendors are building manageability into their gear or establishing stronger connections to management with either partnerships or acquisitions," says George Hamilton, director of enterprise computing and networking at the Yankee Group.

For instance, Cisco staged a management blitz at the end of last year, adding management software to its resume with its Network Application Performance Analysis (NAPA) strategy. With NAPA, the vendor promises to release management software applications for its gear as well as for applications running over Cisco networks.

Nortel expanded the reach of its Optivity product line with its updated Enterprise Network Management System, which the company says encompasses network and advanced IP application management - think voice, video and wireless.

More recently, Citrix acquired Reflectent Software, a vendor tackling application performance on user desktops, to incorporate management into its application virtualization and NetScaler acceleration technologies.