Management software heavyweights BMC, CA, HP and IBM are barely making the grade with their customers, earning C and D averages and driving IT buyers to look elsewhere for their operations management needs, according to a recent Gartner poll.

While the "big four" vendors continue to dominate the top market share slots in IT operations management, Gartner advises the established players to not get complacent based on its 2006 data center conference survey of close to 640 IT buyers. More than 40% of respondents gave the incumbent market leaders a C grade, while nearly 30% suggested the vendors' performance to be closer to a D average.

"Continuing customer satisfaction issues, the emergence of new technology and service delivery approaches, and the rise of large technology infrastructure providers expanding their capabilities into management software all contribute to making these industry leaders vulnerable," Gartner analysts write in a recent report.

Among the several causes for the current customer dissatisfaction is market immaturity, Gartner says, which has management vendors constantly playing catch-up with emerging technologies. For instance, the shift from client-server applications to n-tier applications required those companies monitoring application performance to re-architect their software to keep up in the more dynamic environment. And best practice frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) will contribute to IT operation process maturity and eventually automation, but will also require vendors that delivered products to address specific pain points to streamline their offerings into integrated suites.

"It will be three to five years before vendors engineer management software into integrated, consumable suites and even longer for customers to deploy them," Gartner says.

In the meantime, about one-third of management software buyers polled want to see better pricing and ease-of-use from vendors and would consider other existing vendors a management software supplier.

"Although a grade of C may be considered as middle of the road and not terribly bad, it is also not terribly positive, which open suppliers in the industry up to competition and potential replacement," the report reads.

The management market is about $10 billion and growing, Gartner says, and doing so considerably faster than both the middleware and applications market. With the big four owning about 55% of the market, that leaves room for further consolidation among established players, but also opens the door to fringe players looking to expand further into the management market -- companies such as EMC, Microsoft, Oracle and Symantec. For instance, when Gartner asked which vendors represent a challenge to the management players, about 35% of 106 people polled said Microsoft and close to 25% pointed to Oracle.