* Always plenty of management companies to watch, as management is a necessity not a luxury for IT managers
There is never a shortage of management companies to watch.
That is partly because management crosses all IT domains and is a necessity not a luxury for IT managers. If you roll out a new application, you have to manage it. When you invest in more storage, you have to manage it. When you start a migration or upgrade of desktop operating systems, you have to manage it. Get the idea?
I could go on forever, and really I can. But I won’t because IT executives know they are expected to immediately master managing all new technologies that are introduced to their environments. For instance, VoIP, virtualization, SOA and other emerging technologies are expected to perform out of the gate.
And with new technologies, come new vendors. Take virtualization, specifically x86 server virtualization. The ease of rolling out these servers has its upsides and downsides, management being a downside. And because of that vendors, ranging from one of last year’s pick to watch CiRBA, to one of this year’s choices Veeam.
A little update aside, CiRBA has been chosen as a standard technology by large outsourcing and consulting firms — such as IBM Global Services — for data center consolidation and virtualization engagements.
Yet even with all these successful start-ups, you can never discount the incumbents. HP is in the process of closing its $1.6 billion of Opsware, BMC recently acquire run-book automation vendor RealOps and IBM is topping Gartner and IDC lists for share in user provisioning and software configuration markets, respectively. And virtualization market dominator VMware announced it had acquired virtualization management start-up Dunes Technologies. Admittedly it seems CA has been quiet since its annual stockholders meeting last month, but still you can’t discount such a large software vendor.
Management market watching gets even more exciting when the names of large vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and Symantec are tossed into the discussion. And for me, one of the best parts of watching start-ups is trying to determine which ones will remain stand-alone and which will become business units within the larger management vendors.
