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Everyone loves an underdog story, but this isn't one.
BMC, CA, HP and IBM came to power in the management software market in the 1990s with tools to manage network devices and software designed to keep mainframe systems humming along. Being among the few choices at the time, the vendors dominated the market and customers endured product implementations that could run up to 18 months and spent well into the millions of dollars to get management software in place. But in too many cases, the technology didn't deliver.
As stories of network management framework buyer's remorse echoed throughout the industry, newcomers such as Concord, Micromuse, Riversoft and SMARTS emerged to offer customers easy-to-install, low-cost alternatives to the monolithic, cumbersome products on which the big vendors built their software businesses. And while the innovative players put up a fight and scrapped their way into some customer accounts, the smaller companies no longer exist on their own and their technologies live on inside the management Goliaths, who remain the market leaders.
Over the past several years, CA acquired Concord (which had acquired onetime framework contender and Cabletron spin-off Aprisma Management Technologies); IBM acquired Micromuse; HP acquired a license for RiverSoft technology (and Micromuse acquired RiverSoft before becoming part of Big Blue); and EMC picked up SMARTS. According to industry watchers, the start-ups never had a chance for long-term success.
"Many IT organizations have become adverse to risk. Unless there is a compelling reason to acquire technology from a small and unproven vendor, IT organizations will favor viability over technology," Jean-Pierre Garbani, a research vice president at Forrester Research, said in 2003.
But the battles fought by the start-ups weren't all for naught. The foundation of their business models -- less expensive, lower cost software that actually works -- resonated too much with customers who carry on the battle cry with framework vendors to simplify their software and offer it at reasonable prices. Framework has become a dirty word in the network management industry, and vendors now prefer to call their massive product portfolios integrated suites or management platforms. And in most cases, the integrated applications now offered by one vendor are in fact best-of-breed products collected over the years from the industry's more innovative start-ups.
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Comments (5)
Very good repliesBy tuomoks on November 2, 2007, 2:36 pmI agree. It seems that users have forgotten that a framework is ( should be ) their business, not owned by CA, IBM, HP, etc. Fortunately it seems the trend is changing,...
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Fear, Loathing & Frameworks...By MySvcMon on November 1, 2007, 5:22 pmThe big gorillas may be confusing managing a service portfolio with managing customer needs. As thier catalog of products & services swell to the point of obesity,...
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Frameworks = Vendor Lock & Moutains Of Pain (Roll Your Own!)By Anonymous on October 30, 2007, 12:37 pmI have always put in a series of best of breed application / system / network management products regardless of what the Framework vendors have offered. Anyone...
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Big fish eats small fish, competition goneBy Anonymous on October 30, 2007, 10:16 amThe small guys had the better ideas and the better products, for network savvy engineers that did their own bake-off tests in their own labs. Each one got a bit...
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RE: Frameworks vs. point productsBy Anonymous on October 26, 2007, 12:04 pmThe framework vendors aren't losing any ground even as new disruptive technologies, such as virtualization, emerge -- despite disappointing deployments. Point product...
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