20 hot markets for 2007

The future of network management

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

EMA's report, "20 Hot Markets for 2007" should be coming out of production just at about the time you read this. It was an opportunity for me, along with the rest of the firm, to explore less-than-obvious approaches to capturing less-than-obvious markets with an eye to the future rather than a linear projection of the past. As such, it involved pretty much the whole firm and has become a sounding board for our best minds to look at "markets" in everything from service management to storage and security, to VoIP and out-of-band, and business service management.

However, as the prime orchestrator of the report, I had a chance to formulate some of the ground rules: explicitly not to look for conventional markets in conventional terms but to find hot areas of growth that typically involved implosions and conversions of technologies, more often than not with a cross-domain (network and/or systems, and/or application) flavor. The result was, as I had hoped, not tidy markets, as they ranged from the very small to the very large. Nor were they necessarily designed for market sizing. Markets that are defined to be exclusive taxonomies, so that, for instance, a vendor or product can absolutely fit in only one or the other - often do not reflect the real underlying forces of how this industry grows.

For my money, the most interesting markets in IT management software are messy markets, where technologies explode in multiple and unpredictable ways, serving multiple IT user populations at once, without regard for the old, Mesozoic (read age of dinosaurs) taxonomies. The interesting markets don't care about networks or systems, or even applications; they care about infrastructure-enabled services. And the critical markets will explode so polymorphically that they'll touch - for instance - change and configuration, security and compliance, and service assurance and service provisioning, with the same rhythmic heartbeat.

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EMA's report, "20 Hot Markets for 2007" should be coming out of production just at about the time you read this. It was an opportunity for me, along with the rest of the firm, to explore less-than-obvious approaches to capturing less-than-obvious markets with an eye to the future rather than a linear projection of the past. As such, it involved pretty much the whole firm and has become a sounding board for our best minds to look at "markets" in everything from service management to storage and security, to VoIP and out-of-band, and business service management.

However, as the prime orchestrator of the report, I had a chance to formulate some of the ground rules: explicitly not to look for conventional markets in conventional terms but to find hot areas of growth that typically involved implosions and conversions of technologies, more often than not with a cross-domain (network and/or systems, and/or application) flavor. The result was, as I had hoped, not tidy markets, as they ranged from the very small to the very large. Nor were they necessarily designed for market sizing. Markets that are defined to be exclusive taxonomies, so that, for instance, a vendor or product can absolutely fit in only one or the other - often do not reflect the real underlying forces of how this industry grows.

For my money, the most interesting markets in IT management software are messy markets, where technologies explode in multiple and unpredictable ways, serving multiple IT user populations at once, without regard for the old, Mesozoic (read age of dinosaurs) taxonomies. The interesting markets don't care about networks or systems, or even applications; they care about infrastructure-enabled services. And the critical markets will explode so polymorphically that they'll touch - for instance - change and configuration, security and compliance, and service assurance and service provisioning, with the same rhythmic heartbeat.

Let's take one of the easier targets for ridicule or confusion - or perhaps a bit of both: "network performance management." One would think that, on the face of it, "network performance management" is a perfectly sensible term reflecting those solutions that primarily monitor the performance of the network. And that would mean the performance of network devices individually and collectively. And wouldn't that make sense? Yes, it would.

However, most of the growth in network performance management for the last five years hasn't been in monitoring network devices for classical performance criteria - such as CPU utilization and buffer overload. It's come from looking at the performance and in some cases, active management of IP application traffic over the network.

It's also come from sophisticated investments in looking at user response time in terms of observed and synthetic transactions. And it's come from strong service-level management capabilities for mapping service performance across the infrastructure to committed contracts.

It's come from optimizing the network infrastructure based on application consumption. And it's come from tools that enable application developers to work with network operations, and quality and assurance to actually understand how to prepare new application services for a real networked environment.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.