Net/Systems Management /

The move to more automated, integrated management solutions continues

By Dennis Drogseth
Network World Network Systems Management Newsletter, 02/07/00

It may suggest a moral defect to write a column about announcements made at a show I couldn't attend, but I succumbed to the temptation, anyway. The reason this time is that a number of people - in search of a common thread - asked me about the announcements. Also, to be fair, I had been briefed beforehand, so the column isn't written as blindly as it might seem.

The announcements I've received the most questions about were CACI with CompuWare, Aprisma's Web strategy, InfoVista's new data mart for service-level management and RiverSoft's announcement of a Network Management Operating System.
And of course just the week before, Concord announced a merger with FirstSense. Is all this just random clutter with an odd mix of marketing and product content, or is something more meaningful afoot?
I view each of these announcements favorably, and I do think there is something meaningful going on. This is not a new thought on my part here. Those of you who read this column regularly will be reminded of a common thread - an emphasis on more automated, integrated management solutions. For "integrated," read both cohesive and cross-disciplinary, in the sense of networks, systems and applications.

CACI with CompuWare integrates application design with performance management in a series of increasingly automated tradeoffs that bode well for application and network performance. Aprisma's Web strategy helps to ease the management of one of the industry's first architectures built to automate management across disciplines. Concord's announced merger with FirstSense plays to the exciting seam where application and network management intersect - for reporting and more.
Service-level management (SLM) vendor InfoVista's VistaMart (which includes data mart) addresses two problems with a single architecture. One is scalability, which had in the past been a limiter for InfoVista. Scalability is now achieved in a manner substantial enough for the service provider market. However, InfoVista's VistaMart also brings together a variety of functions and information sources, including application performance analysis, bandwidth performance, quality of service, billing and accounting, and Trouble-Ticketing. It's also designed for data analysis, including data mining, to leverage this rich data source for patterns and insights that can affect the delivery of business services across the network. Is it a little New Age? It may seem so, but InfoVista isn't the first vendor to apply data mining and data warehousing to management software. It may well be the first to truly succeed with it in the SLM space.

RiverSoft's announcement of a Network Management Operating System, called i3 philOSophy, may at first seem like one of the more perplexing announcements from ComNet, but it's also one of the most far reaching.
The basics are this. Frameworks, as almost everyone in the world has noted, are difficult and time consuming to implement and, perhaps even more importantly, difficult and time consuming to keep current. While each framework vendor has taken steps to improve this, and some of the improvements are considerable, the frameworks' foundation in universality vs. organic efficiency has proved too porous for the fast-paced change of Internet-driven business.

What would be the right organic foundation for a more dynamic management structure? I would be hard pressed to find a better combination than accurate, self-adaptive topology and a fairly automated event-correlation system. These are precisely RiverSoft's design points, and as this announcement points out, it's not just by happenstance. RiverSoft also has the advantage of being new, with a fresh eye to emerging standards such as Directory Enabled Network, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and XML. Also, it's architected to support Wireless Application Protocol.

RiverSoft announced that it was introducing partner applications to exploit its base. This makes sense, especially if over time these applications truly profit from RiverSoft's strengths in topology and event correlation. RiverSoft's partners are SilverBack Technologies, a promising newcomer with an integrated management software and services offering; Freshwater Software, for Internet application performance monitoring; and tellingly, InfoVista.
All these announcements reflect a meaningful change in the industry. While it would be foolish to assume that every new entry along these lines will be a roaring success, the weight of this news, on top of other announcements made in the latter half of 1999, argues that something worthwhile is happening. Enterprise and service provider users should be encouraged, and also a little more demanding, than in the past.