The secret sauce: Interoperability

As automation and intelligence efforts gain steam, success will depend on the interoperability of the tools. Products must be able to talk to each other without IT managers fussing with configurations and command lines.

IDC Vice President of Software Tony Bacardi says, "Vendors are getting religion about standards. It's no longer OK to have proprietary APIs."

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As automation and intelligence efforts gain steam, success will depend on the interoperability of the tools. Products must be able to talk to each other without IT managers fussing with configurations and command lines.

IDC Vice President of Software Tony Bacardi says, "Vendors are getting religion about standards. It's no longer OK to have proprietary APIs."

Michael Marks, director of strategic alliances and market development group at Concord Communications, says, "If we can manage multiple types of network technologies and types of applications and in a consistent way and all in a consistent workflow, then companies can lower their operating expenses because they don't have to train their teams on each program. It's our responsibility to understand the nuances of IT infrastructure."

Bacardi says this shift has come about because IT shops are demanding it. "Everybody has full-time staff allocated to fixing flaws," he says. "They perceive this as unneeded complexity and they'd rather get on to doing new things rather than babysitting the network."

He says IT managers are rebelling. "They're saying, 'Don't come in front of us until your stuff works together. We don't have time to be your integration shop, and we'd rather wait until you work it out.'"

Vendors are quick to tout their relationships with partners. For instance, Varun Nagaraj, vice president of product management at Extreme Networks, says his company is working closely with Avaya on automated convergence tools. The companies are delivering an integrated management tool that lets customers view phones as network elements, which lets customers manage the converged voice and data infrastructure via one network map, he says.

"The industry has to realize no one controls the total solution and we need to tie into a larger infrastructure," Nagaraj says. "We have to design networks to be able to be integrated and interoperable."

This will be music to IT managers' ears. "We keep saying to vendors, 'keep it simple,' " says Bob Kelly, CIO at New York state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal. "My staff doesn't have the time to learn yet another application, so the tools [we choose] have to be easy to use and understand."

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.