Today no single company - including Computer Associates, HP and IBM - comes close to managing all aspects of IT in unified, coherent way. 

Each of these vendors has a handle on the three main aspects of IT - servers, storage and networking - and on the security issues that stretch across all three domains. None however has integrated the management of the different domains to offer us a comprehensive view.  At present no vendor, however broad its product portfolio, monitors, analyzes and manages how every aspect of the infrastructure interacts with and influences all the other parts.

If you are a reader who works in a smaller or midsize IT environment, this will not be much of an issue for you at present. The relatively non-complex systems with which you work probably don't lose much because they are managed discretely as separate parts. As your shop grows however, across-the-system management will become increasingly important. In a dynamically changing enterprise environment, this type of management will eventually provide significant advantage that can differentiate your company from your competitors.

All of this leads to the issue of on-demand computing.

The two key points of any on-demand computing environment will be the degree to which the networks, servers and storage are virtualized (so that resources can be allocated and reallocated easily), and the extent to which the overall system is automated.  

Keep that in mind. As IT managers start to ramp up their buying (yes, this is actually happening), they should remember that this ability to "look across the system" is precisely the sort of thing they have a right to demand from any vendor positioning itself as a provider of utility (or "on-demand", or "adaptive") computing environments.

Providing a flexible infrastructure to support on-demand computing is precisely where HP has positioned itself during the last two years (it prefer the term "adaptive enterprise"). Unfortunately, while most of what HP has talked about to analysts and customers alike has been interesting in theory, the company often came up short when it came to providing important deliverables.

Based on what I saw and heard during two days with HP's management last week however, it seems to me that HP is at last beginning to roll out a set of management products that are the forerunner of an integrated, comprehensive IT management tool. HP isn't there yet (who is?), but at least it is moving in the right direction.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.