The big four management vendors have been occupying their seats for quite some time but that doesn't mean they haven't undergone major changes in the process.

BMC overhauled its market position with its business service management (BSM) strategy and CA revamped first the new company with a executive management refresh and then its product portfolio by focusing on Enterprise IT Management. But for fellow big four vendors, HP and IBM the landscape is a bit different.

For instance, when talking about the big four management vendors, discussions often fall into two camps: BMC and CA, which provide platform-agnostic IT management software; and HP and IBM, which also promise the same neutral management wares, but the two vendors also separately sell servers, storage, virtualization, service-oriented architecture and other products -- oftentimes making talk of their management portfolios secondary.

Take HP. Its OpenView products (now under the umbrella of HP Software since HP completed its $4.5 billion Mercury Interactive acquisition last year) have long been hailed as having the largest installed base of customers worldwide. (I personally haven't seen market share numbers recently making this absolute truth, but when I write about HP software, I inevitably get many e-mails asking about what's new in Network Node Manager.) Yet as popular as OpenView is, the vendor has been criticized for not making it more critical to its business -- until recently.

"A few years ago, as HP OpenView became a profitable proposition within HP for the first time, it embarked on two major acquisitions that redefined the IT management software landscape," Forrester's SWOT analysis of HP reads. "HP Software -- the combination of OpenView and Mercury -- seems to be ideally suited to providing a strong next generation of service-oriented solutions, combining Mercury's strength in life-cycle management, CMDB and application mapping with OpenView's data acquisition abilities."

Add to that HP's acquisition of Peregrine Systems, and the vendor should be able to take the IT management market by storm. Yet Forrester suggests HP could face challenges in uniting its sales force with Mercury's as well as aligning its software business unit with others at the company.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.