* How well will management vendors cope with the new priorities in the management space?
In last Wednesday’s newsletter, we referred to IBM’s acquisition of Internet Security Systems as yet another milestone in the convergence of leading security vendors with dominant IT players. That trend was further accentuated last week when Cisco and Microsoft – two industry giants that are dominating the security market – demonstrated the compatibility of Cisco Network Admission Control and Microsoft Network Access Protection. The area of network access control is expected to directly impact how IT security is provisioned and managed.
As discussed last time, the convergence of security leadership and IT dominance is becoming more than a trend that promotes one-stop shopping, it points to the direct integration of security values with emerging technologies that offer applications as services. (Such integration is a situation that security professionals see as long overdue.) While the advancement of service-oriented architectures (SOA) may be taking longer or costing more in some cases than anticipated, this has not detract a number of professionals from seeing SOA as the most significant trend in application development and integration in a decade.
This evolution has significant consequences for IT. To name just a couple:
* SOA technologies such as Web services tend to be extremely chatty protocols with a heavy emphasis on text-based interaction and require network optimization coupled with visibility into network content and intelligence in traffic handling.
* Vendors with existing expertise in application architectures are gaining an early lead in SOA and Web services penetration. Expertise in application networking, integration and – in the wake of high-profile security breaches that targeted applications – application security, will help these vendors dominate the new management market that combines security with applications.
Other technologies having a significant impact on the evolution of management include:
* The information infrastructure – A significant aspect of application functionality, thanks in no small measure to the high-value content communicated by these applications. The ability to quickly recognize and locate information of all kinds is key here. For vendors, such high value content will enable dominant IT leaders such as Cisco to push deeper into non-enterprise markets, such as consumer. The emergence of online communities and their enabling technologies are determining which content and content delivery methods succeed, and which don’t.
* Virtualization – Consider the impact of technologies such as content addressed storage (CAS) in EMC’s Centera platform, which locates information based on its content rather than a physical address. Couple that with something like Citrix NetScaler’s Request Switching capabilities that optimize application network traffic, not just at the physical addressing level but at the application request level, and the emergence of a broad set of capabilities that can abstract information from its physical linkages becomes apparent. When driven by current trends in remote access and application delivery, virtualization becomes a primary value.
These and other factors are not only precipitating new ways to deliver IT, services and high-value content, they are also revolutionizing approaches to IT management. As they become more widely adopted, they will directly impact the management market in ways that will determine who will lead and who will follow. We may one day look back at this point and see it as a critical tipping point when existing management leaders either proved their ability to not just adapt but also to preserve and extend their value, or fade into irrelevance as new leaders emerge.
