SilverBack Technologies has a capability for modular service creation that bodes well for customer choice, facilitating virtually on-demand selection of management services.

What’s required to do this is largely the following:

* An integrated data store.

* A flexible partitioning capability to allow for discrete, policy-centric aggregates of information, so that “customer x” can be mapped to “services x, y, and z” with its own discrete policies and priorities. In SilverBack’s case, it allows for mapping management domains (fault, performance, security and asset management) to fit changing customer requirements and choice.

* A user interface designed to securely and accurately generate multiple views for specific user roles in real-time. One example for SilverBack might be compliance-specific views - for example, for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

* Reporting focused on business priorities with a close tie-in to the networked infrastructure.

* Policy enforcement of management actions executed either automatically or with user approval.

In SilverBack’s case, this functionality is combined with easily deployed and versatile outreach - through either VPN or HTTPS connections - and an approach to management that has always been secure and reliable.

If you combine all these ingredients, taking the specific of SilverBack out of the picture for a moment, you get insights on some next-generation management requirements that we analysts - along, one would hope, with many vendors - are trying to define, promote and evolve.

In this case, it’s a paradigm of service creation that includes service deployment as an automated subset. A new management service is so easily provisioned and defined that the timeframes can be responsive to new requirements as they emerge, in something that approximates real-time.

The implications of this in any market - from small and midsize business (SMB), to enterprise, to carrier - are significant. Management services have traditionally not been on the fast track when it comes to deployment and outreach. Most automation, when it’s there at all, has focused on post-deployment scenarios, and to a large degree this is a natural outgrowth of the need to think through management services and management processes, and treat them with care and forethought.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.