Cisco and Microsoft may not be the first vendors that come to mind for management, but they want to be
Cisco and Microsoft typically come to mind when talking network equipment and operating system software, respectively. Yet in 2007 these vendors separately could solidify their roles in the management world as well.
BMC, CA, HP and IBM have dominated the network and systems management market for quite some time. Despite myriad vendors emerging and dissolving, there hasn’t been much by means of competition for the heavyweights.
“It is difficult to become a real threat to the big four management players these days,” says Stephen Elliot, a senior analyst at IDC. That’s partly because these veteran management vendors tend to be the ones controlling the market, either by acquiring the competition as HP recently did with its Mercury Interactive acquisition or coining the latest trends as BMC did with its business service management strategy. But it also has to do with how willing enterprise IT managers are to remove old software and start fresh with new systems
Enter Cisco and Microsoft. Industry watchers speculate — based on recent moves and future plans by the vendors — that they might just be willing to take advantage of their respective installed bases of customers to sell management technologies into those existing accounts.
“As Cisco and Microsoft — and to some extent EMC — get more aggressive in technology, OEM deals and acquisitions around management, you can’t help but wonder if they aren’t going aggressively after that market share,” Elliot says.
For its part, Cisco in late 2005 started its management campaign with the debut of its Network Application Performance Analysis product suite and then in summer 2006 the vendor announced its Proactive Automation of Change Execution suite, which the vendor is able to deliver through a licensing deal with Opsware.
“Cisco’s is a broader discussion around management,” says Dennis Drogseth, a vice president with Enterprise Management Associates. “It has the configuration tools, but its potential goes beyond that.”
The vendor is betting that its hold on the network equipment market will parlay into management budget dollars.
“Cisco might suggest to customers that they increase their network spend, but the vendor ideally would also help them cut their computing spend by embedding the network with key IT applications, and management is a primary one,” says Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president of enterprise research at Yankee Group
Separately, Microsoft could get some management market share based on brand recognition alone. The vendor, which is focusing its 2007 on Vista and Longhorn deliveries, could also capitalize on management opportunities.
The company in 2006 announced a couple of initiatives — one around enterprise search capabilities and one around unified communications with Nortel — that could further expand its reach in enterprise accounts. And Microsoft expanded its partnership with Cisco around network access control technologies, which provides policy-based management technologies to secure network devices and systems.
But virtualization could be what puts Microsoft over the top in terms of management. Microsoft announced it would acquire application virtualization vendor Softricity this past summer and also expanded its systems management capabilities beyond Systems Management Server and Microsoft Operations Manager software.
With the Softricity buy, Microsoft will bring the vendor’s SoftGrid capabilities under its Dynamic Systems Initiative, which is a plan to create a management platform for Windows.
“When I ask enterprise clients who the management market share leaders will be in 2010, a majority of them say Microsoft,” says Jean-Pierre Garbani, a vice president with Forrester Research. “Brand perception is still very strong, stronger than innovation and visionary thinking. It is an advantage for Microsoft.”
