* More hot areas of network management
In the last newsletter I wrote about the so-called “network management” market – which has become a holding area for some truly hot technologies as well as traditional approaches (such as element-centric event filtering) that will always be with us but won’t be areas of high growth. Last week I wrote about several “hot areas” of management; this week I’m going to extend the list to a few more areas.
* Anomaly detection and integrated security management. This is logically a messy category, really two circles that overlap. Anomaly detection is of course a critical enabler for security products in detecting worms and other intrusions that result in abnormally high volumes of traffic or unusual traffic patterns. But anomaly detection can also be an extremely valuable way to understand infrastructure performance more broadly, to establish real baselines, and even to filter events. Clearly, anomaly detection is a technology that can bring security and network management together.
* Chargeback. I am beginning to see real recognition that getting to the roots of service cost is essential. However, chargeback still has a bad name because too many IT shops have implemented it as a niche initiative, rather than as a keystone to a broader service strategy. The fact that there is a hodgepodge of separate approaches to chargeback – network, storage, system/database, among others – hasn’t helped, either. But this will change, and I expect to see chargeback really coming alive in the next six to 18 months.
* Service impact management and BSM. Given the volume of marketing attention to this area, I am going to keep my commentary here minimal. Two things are worth pointing out. Business-to-IT alignment is multi-dimensional and 100% critical. And business services are rarely the same as a single application service, so modeling key points of IT-to-business intersections is going to be an area of growth, creativity and exploration for the next decade.
* Network change and configuration management. Enterprise Management Associates has written about NCCM in many other columns. It remains a hot area not primarily in terms of it being a single, finite market, but more in terms of it being a pervasive enabler for a host of other benefits. These include operational automation and change control, compliance and IT governance, service provisioning, service assurance – and yes, NCCM is a critical component to future configuration management databases.
* Inventory, resource and asset management. If cost and quality are the sole two critical parameters for assessing services at the highest level, then asset management – including hardware, software and contracts – is critical right along with chargeback in getting at cost. In fact, the two initiatives are complementary, and determining full service costs isn’t possible without both.
* VoIP. Suffice it to say that VoIP is really finally taking off – well beyond the experimentation that was typical up until a year ago. But as VoIP finally succeeds as a technology, it raises new questions. Saving money in capital investments has (surprise!) turned out not to be the big thing. The notion of common transport and an integrated service portfolio remains a real – although still mystical – goal, and the “killer app” will, in my view, never materialize in the way most people imagine it today. Instead, look for organizational and operational efficiencies with dramatic savings, in which the data-centric help desk and the telephony call center will learn to share best practices (right now they don’t even speak the same language), and in which the killer app is flexibility in defining and provisioning services.
There are other key areas of network management innovation that at least deserve some mention. Wireless will demand a tidal wave of innovation, but still slumbers on the perimeters of enterprise network management for now. WAN provisioning across multiple carriers – including MPLS-IP-VPN support as an example – will become an area of increasing business and process growth. And integrated storage management will place demands on managing total infrastructure performance.
No doubt this list is incomplete. I’m sure you can think of other areas – and if you have thoughts or comments, I welcome them. But to wrap up – revisiting the main thought that first spawned this column – “network management” as a discrete category is no longer meaningful in any way that I can see. It does come to life, however, once you see it as shell within which exist many separate and very dynamic markets. In last week’s and this week’s columns, I have done my best to present at least a few.
