Continuing our look back at 2006, let’s look at some of the things that caught my personal attention in 2006 (the emphasis should be placed on the words “some” and “personal”), and how they will play out in 2007.

Last time, I discussed a few points regarding IBM, HP, BMC and CA. Today, I’m going to make a few observations about EMC and Symantec, configuration management – especially network configuration management, flow-based management and quality of experience (QoE). There is of course much more to talk about and I’ll leave that to future columns, such as the status of CMDB adoption, the direction of business service management, and next generation asset management.

EMC is a company to watch as it emerges into a more mainstream management posture, even if there are some glitches in performance. EMC’s acquisition of nLayers after the latter’s partnership announcement with EMC Smarts for application aware analytics (comparators and correlation), caught my attention in a very positive way. In addition, EMC’s breadth of capabilities in storage combined with VMware (in spite of VMware’s need for independence) and the RSA acquisition, as well as its strengths in content and document management, suggest a unique but sizeable footprint in data center automation. EMC is seeking to define the best path for a more overarching management strategy, including its rightful CMDB position, and of course a lot rides on where and what happens there.

Symantec is another company to watch, although one I’m currently not as close to as EMC. Symantec is emerging with its own CMDB strategy thanks in part to its Relicore acquisition. It may be building from there towards a more central capability that’s far more recognizable to most of us as core enterprise management, compared to its recent, enigmatic strategy centered in systems security and storage. Time will tell, and I believe that 2007 will be a pivotal year for Symantec in this regard.

Configuration management, and in particular network configuration management, has been more eventful in 2006 than I suspect most in the industry realize. While this topic deserves multiple columns to itself (and EMA is putting a lot of focus on it in 2007), the first thing to say is that most of the leading vendors are beginning to differentiate in compelling ways, such as analytics as applied to correlating configuration changes with infrastructure and service performance; richer asset and compliance management capabilities; and more integrated capabilities for automation.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.