Industry watchers, vendors, enterprise IT managers and the occasional journalist have debated for years over whether management frameworks or point products are better. The framework vendors – IBM, HP, BMC, Computer Associates and Aprisma – offered huge technology platforms that took from 6 months to a year to roll out and required near geniuses to administer them. And point products from the likes of Micromuse, Smarts, RiverSoft, Tavve and Concord emerged to offer a less expensive, more practical and just plain simpler approach to managing network, systems and applications.
Despite the innovation offered by the smaller players, a recent study by Giga Information Group, shows IBM, HP, CA and BMC dominate the $5.1 billion market for infrastructure performance management. Among the IT disciplines under this umbrella are: device monitoring (HP leads); server management (BMC wins); application management (BMC again); enterprise application integration and middleware (IBM Tivoli); database management (BMC once more); and the winner of the overall ranking category is IBM Tivoli. While CA won no top spot in this study, the company is firmly placed in the top four for each category.
Aprisma is nowhere to be found among the management heavyweights, but the company does pop up among the service assurance point products – yet not in the lead. The leading vendors in this category are Micromuse, Network Associates, Heroix, NetIQ, Candle and Quest, according to Giga. Smarts, Compuware, Concord and Mercury Interactive also rank as leaders in service assurance software, which is basically application service-level management.
The one thing all the vendors now have in common, according to Giga, is a need to address customers that want to manage their IT infrastructure as a whole and not merely control the components.
Jean-Pierre Garbani, who authored this report, says network and systems management product leaders have successfully advanced their offerings, which coupled with their business stability and name recognition, enabled them in the past two years to stay ahead of the point players. With large cash reserves, the ability to acquire or develop new technology, and a large installed base to keep money coming in, big vendors weathered the tough economic storm and managed to win new accounts in a market that remained relatively flat. Giga estimates the infrastructure performance management market in 2002 topped $4.9 billion and increased only a bit to $5.1 billion this year.
"Many IT organizations have become adverse to risk. Unless there is a compelling reason to acquire technology from a small and unproven vendor, IT organizations will favor viability over technology," he says.
Are you making any investments in management right now? If yes, what are your top priorities? Let me know at ddubie@nww.com.
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Overview of network troubleshooting that provides an assessment of where we are, and where we need to be relative to the complexities of today's IT challenges.
