* Validation of the network's critical role in any successful company
Call me biased, but I have to say I love it when management vendors buy network-specific technology and then industry watchers can’t help but talk about how important the network is to application performance, IT service management and overall business success.
The most recent validation of the network’s critical role in any successful company came when BMC announced it had acquired Emprisa Networks. The acquisition brings Emprisa’s network and change configuration management software into BMC’s broad Business Service Management suite and couples the network-centric technology with BMC’s other recent buy: RealOps Automation Management Platform (AMP).
Now we at Network World can talk about the network at any time for any reason, but such industry acquisitions give me lots of reasons to make a fuss about why the network is critical to the success of other IT management initiatives. And in all due respect to BMC, I made the same fuss when CA acquired Concord (and Aprisma Management Technologies in the process) and IBM acquired Micromuse. And when HP acquired Opsware, which in one fell swoop brought data center automation (Opsware) network device change and configuration management software (Rendition Networks) and IT process, or run book, automation (iConclude) technology in house for HP. Opsware had previously acquired the latter two companies.
For as long as I have been covering the management market, about seven years, the goal has been to manage the IT infrastructure in such a way that it supports the highest priority business applications or services. And the approaches vendors have proposed varied. For instance, there was a time when the bottom-up approach ruled the market. Companies such as Aprisma, SMARTS (acquired by EMC) and Micromuse promised to solve customers’ problems by determining the root cause of service outages via fault management. Then companies such as Mercury Interactive (acquired last year by HP) and Managed Objects offered a top-down approach that involved monitoring the application performance and server response times as a means to quickly alleviate the customer pain.
Guess what? To accurately and adequately manage IT services and improve the performance of applications and ultimately the business, you need to monitor the network and all the components running on it, connected to it, tapping its resources and using it as a means of transfer from the top, the bottom, the side, the front and the back.
I am exaggerating just a bit here for dramatic purposes – the truth is most vendors have not been wrong in their approaches, but they have been incomplete and in some cases without context.
For instance, all components on the network are equal in importance when it comes to managing business services. IT managers must be able to manage such components and manage them in context of the business service. By acquiring Emprisa, BMC is bringing detailed knowledge of device configuration into its broader business service management suite.
“Business services involve software, servers, network and storage so if you want to control the configuration and the capacity of your business services you need to have knobs for each infrastructure area,” says Jasmine Noel, principal analyst at Ptak, Noel and Associates. “Emprisa gives them the control knob for networks, which BMC didn’t have before.”
