* A look at applications management in the past year
Since this is my last column of 2006, it’s hard to resist the impulse to look back on the past year and reminisce fondly about the year’s developments from the service-oriented application and application management perspectives. Those of you interested in storage probably remember Mike Karp’s Fa-la-la column from last year, and having lived through another year of applications management acquisitions it’s tempting to follow suit. But since his singing voice is better than mine, I’ll just recap what I remember from the blur of the past 12 months.
It was definitely another year of acquisitions, and in reviewing my 2006 Impact Brief library, I see that I’m likely in the running for “Brief Queen” at EMA for another year. In a sage move, CA acquired Wily, whose Introscope solutions continue to evolve their deep visibility into .Net, Java and Web applications generally. Progress Software’s Sonic division acquired Actional, which promptly vanished from the radar – at least my radar. In an inspired move, WebMethods acquired both Infravio, one of the last available SOA governance and Registry/Repository vendors, and Cerebra, positioning them towards a vision of cross-industry (think healthcare and insurance) SOA integration.
Continuing the trend, BMC acquired Identify, a nifty root-cause analysis product with TiVo-like capabilities to record and replay details surrounding an application problem. Citrix acquired Reflectent, which made perfect sense given Reflectent’s visibility to Citrix environments from both the Presentation Server and the end-user perspectives. Forum acquired Kenai, beefing up the security aspect of its XML-centric functionality. And SOA Software swallowed up Blue Titan, which it continued to develop through the year, and which served as a foundation for the Workbench closed-loop governance product.
IBM acquired Webify, adding industry-specific SOA assets to IBM’s already hefty SOA product line-up. And Mercury acquired Systinet, which it barely had time to digest before being acquired by HP.
2006 was also the year when the lines between network, storage, and application management, along with other disciplines such as ITIL (specifically CMDB) and business service management became extremely blurry. Increasingly, we at EMA see these areas converging, and the SOA research we published this year talked about this in detail.
Products traditionally known as network management offerings, such as NetScout and the other appliance-based solutions mentioned in my last column are using their deep visibility to application traffic to build out a multi-dimensional “fabric” view of the infrastructure. This sets the stage for corralling the management issues around SOA and Web services. The CMDB comes into play, not just as a basis for asset management, but as the foundation for automated application mapping and real-time event management. We at EMA are covering this convergence with an increasing number of cross-practice research projects during 2007, which will continue to shed light on this discussion.
In sum, it has been an interesting and pivotal year, as SOA has crested early adoption and moved into the mainstream, and as application management solutions have finally matured to the point where they actually have a “gee whiz” level of intelligence and functionality. It’s always nice to see products with that “How did they do that?” factor and I’ve seen a lot of them coming to market this year.
Stay tuned for 2007.
