* The many faces of convergence
One of our clients last week reminded me that “convergence” is taking on multiple meanings in our industry, beyond the convergence of voice and data traffic.
The client was thinking of the need to manage multiple network environments consistently – MPLS, ATM and frame relay – and then the convergence of IT organizations managing network and application traffic also came up. I pretty much shut down the conversation there, realizing that “convergence” could easily become a kind of catalyst for looking at many of the forces shaping both IT organizations and technology requirements in enterprise management.
The Oxford American Dictionary defines convergence as “coming to or towards the same point.” While this may be the ultimate endgame for many of the trends in enterprise management today, “convergence” in our marketplace means something more like “coming to or towards the same fuzzy middle ground.”
From both a technology – and certainly from an organizational – perspective, it’s more like immigrants from different countries arriving on New World shores and trying to find a better way to work together. For today’s column, I thought I’d pick a few examples to prove this point.
* VoIP – Voice over Internet Protocol, in bringing together voice and data traffic, and bringing together media and IP transport more generally (e.g., video on demand) is actually stimulating multiple types of convergence. These include the most commonly observed example of convergence – an integrated IP services network infrastructure. But VoIP and IP telephony will also demand an integrated approach to managing more heterogeneous applications (a convergence of telecommunications and data center application types) and through this stimulate organizational convergence – for instance, integrating the call center and the help desk with common processes and tool sets.
* Converging technology models in network and application performance – Probably the most accelerated cross-silo discussions occurring today are those where network and application performance teams are beginning to work together. But the flipside to this is that network and application technologies are also beginning to converge. Application flow management is the network model for managing aggregated or individual application flows as network traffic. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services deconstruct applications into modular, networked components that interact with each other across a geographically diffuse infrastructure. SOA also converges application design and business process. While the right hand (the application) and the left hand (the network) certainly aren’t converged yet in terms of architecture, both are moving to a view of managing services that interact in multi-dimensional and unpredictable ways.
* Converging organizations – IT silos of networks, systems, apps, storage and security are beginning to converge along with their technologies, following the vision of managing an “infrastructure” to support a “business service.” Enterprise Management Associates predicts the IT model of the future will be an integrated central operations team with common processes and tools supported by domain specialists.
* Converging best practices – As the models for managing enterprise IT and service provider Operation Support Systems begin to have more in common, organizations such as the Telemanagement Forum are examining IT best practices, such as those from the IT Infrastructure Library. While these efforts are not likely to converge to a single “point,” they should result in a productive middle ground.
* Converging brands, otherwise known as mergers and acquisitions – Just look at the management marketplace and you’ll see an amalgam of brands that are beginning to converge through M&A. And of course it’s not just brands – it’s product categories: root-cause analysis with storage, security with storage, data gathering with analytics, network management with systems management, etc. What we’re looking at are converging solution sets – not indeed to a point, but to a fuzzy middle ground in which vendors are struggling for hegemony by providing integrated suites with competitive advantages for themselves, and seemingly for you, the buyer.
So is all this convergence a good thing? For the most part, I would say yes. It may not always seem that way when these grand designs hover in the air like storm clouds while you’re back on earth trying to put out ground fires. But storm clouds eventually bring rain – and I believe that all of these trends will provide benefits for IT over time.
Convergence, like many meaningful trends in this industry, depends upon catalytic forces that will evolve over years and probably decades. These are good industry directions, but they require patience.
