Management technology is an ever-changing mainstay in enterprise IT shops.

Network and systems management tools - whether commercial, home-grown or open source - have been put in place to: monitor device and system status and health; ensure network, systems and applications remain available; and guarantee overall IT services continue to perform as expected (Compare Network Monitoring and Management products).

And because environments experience near-constant change, the tools must also evolve to keep current. One of the recent disruptions to the management realm is virtualization. Despite some early opinions that virtual servers could be managed in the same way as physical servers, the market today realizes virtual environments need an evolved management tool.

"Existing vendors aren't doing a good enough job" of providing tools to take of the many facets of managing virtual servers, says Andi Mann, a research director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). Hence a slew of start-ups have begun to emerge with technology built from the ground up to address the headaches bound to come on in a heterogeneous multi-platform virtual server environment.

Companies such as Embotics, Fortisphere, VKernel and four others highlighted here modeled their business on the premise that SMB and enterprise IT managers will need new management tools as server virtualization adoption continues to grow in popularity. While these vendors propose ways to manage virtual servers, what will become of them when virtualization platform providers and third-party management vendors start ramping up their management efforts?

Melissa Chang, a former Network World colleague, is now president of Pure Incubation, an Internet incubator that basically is a company that starts other Internet companies. And while not directly related to enterprise management software start-ups, Chang in her blog offers tips for start-ups on how to save money, get over initial hurdles and simply let go and launch a new company. Less clear to me is how virtual management software start-ups offering innovative approaches to real problems will escape the deep pockets of big vendors such as HP and IBM, which have made acquiring companies a sport in the past few years?

Already two start-ups focusing on virtual management -- Dunes Technologies and Vizioncore -- have gone the way of acquisition. VMware picked up Dunes and Quest Software recently completed its acquisition of Vizioncore, though the company will continue to operate on its own. Who's next? And who will be shopping first?

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.