Enterprise Management Associates is back again after a year of absence, this time on a monthly basis. We've really missed your dialog and comments, and hopefully we've been missed as well. As before, this column will focus on network management trends as they fit into the bigger IT management landscape - focusing from time to time on application performance, or SLM versus BSM, or new approaches to asset management, or trends like CMDB adoption as they may affect the NOC.
But as an opening column, I'd like to target an area that has begun to haunt me, as well as some of our IT clients: What ever happened to network management?
This column idea was sparked by a query from an executive in operations working with EMA to try to figure out what a viable network management strategy should look like in 2008. This was not a naA¯ve individual, but one who couldn't sort out where to begin in planning to address network management in an environment so changed from what it had been even five years ago.
Let's just start by looking at the obvious marketplace phenomena. Five years ago, when many of us thought of network management, we looked at companies like SMARTS, Micromuse, Aprisma (Spectrum) and Concord as good places to begin. While there were many other significant companies out there, these brands were very much at the center of what defined the network management marketplace, along of course with HP.
But just in case you've been stranded in the Pacific for the last half decade, SMARTS was acquired by EMC late in 2004, CA acquired Aprisma and Concord (after Concord acquired Aprisma) in 2005, and Micromuse was acquired by IBM in 2005. Last year Quest acquired Magnum Technologies, a much smaller but still 'core" brand in network management. This leaves other small players in the event management area such as Entuity, CITTIO and Monolith, as well as more mid-market and SMB offerings such as Solar Winds and Ipswitch. Yet for the most part these vendors are overshadowed by enterprise brands in which the role of network management has become, to be blunt, problematic. In many of these platforms, politics have gotten in the way of effective integration, leaving network management and its potentially transcendent technologies (analytics, discovery, etc.) in a virtual limbo between foundation and stepchild.
There have been other bright spots, however, that may suggest a redefinition of what the "heartland" of network management may be. The most conspicuous is a focus on application management, in what EMA is now calling "Networked Application Management," managing application services over a network for QoE, diagnostics and optimized performance. This area includes technologies such as application trace, flows for application volumes, packet analysis, latency, transaction response time, QoE and RUM, and WAN optimization technologies.
One might argue that this already has become the new heartland for network management. Vendors in this market are far too numerous to honor fully here, but a few obvious names are NetScout (which acquired Network General), Fluke Networks, NetQoS, Network Instruments and in many respects OPNET (which acquired Network Physics technology). Compuware and Cisco play very well to this space as well.
Then there are the smaller innovators such as Apparent Networks, AdventNet, Coradiant, Network Instruments, Packet Design, Packet Trap, Valencia Systems, Wildpackets and Xangati. And there are a cluster of moneymakers such as Riverbed, Packeteer and Expand focusing on WAN optimization, and hard-to-classify but important vendors such as Shunra, Netcordia and Ipanema -- all of which could claim some fit to this market.
Another area worth noting is the rise of network change and configuration management - but this too is a story of many acquisitions - Opsware to HP, Emprisa to BMC and Voyence to EMC (all last year), with freestanding vendors such as AlterPoint and Intelliden, and a cluster of innovators and some newcomers such as Dorado, UpLogix (with its unique mix of out-of-band, config and monitoring), and ArcSight (with its focus on security).
Asset-oriented network management vendors are another area worth looking at, but so far the market here seems as fragmented as the rest. Rivermine, Avotus, Asentinel and Digital Fairway focus on telecommunications resource management. Planet Associates and Visionael focus on managing and planning for change, and in the case of Planet Associates there is a well-thought-out CMDB capability. While these are just a few examples, the leadership among network vendors in next-generation asset management (in which change and service management unite with financial planning) is still very early-stage.
Then there are the many new innovators in unified communications and VoIP, wireless, and integrated network and security management. The names and brands here are indeed far too numerous to mention. But if you look at the list of Interop participants, for instance, these tend to dominate on a volume basis.
So, what ever did happen to network management? In my opinion, from an overall market perspective, network management has lost its way. While much of the rest of the management industry has been seeking out innovative approaches to unifying technologies and integrating cross-domain technologies, network management as a market has done just the opposite -- it has fragmented into non-logical, opportunistic and sometimes tactical pieces.
It's sad to see that these this fragmentation is already undercutting the role of the NOC as the place where "things can come together" and interdependencies can be managed more holistically. All the sadder since this need to manage interdependencies across domains has become the defining set of requirements for the management industry as a whole.
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Comments
What Ever Happened to Network Management?
Amazing how innovation slows the bigger the Company is!
With acquisition comes the fact the development may slow down in an effort to put out invoices in order to be more marketable for acquisition. Then when the transition occurs, development centers on integration accross the other portfolio products rather than new stuff.
Kind of ironic was that in the late 1990s and early 2000, companies RUSHED to check blocks on capabilities on their glossies. For example, Event correlation means so many different things to soo many products, customers are STILL CONFUSED!
Me - I'm still doing the same old stuff. Netcool. Openview. It has changed some but not all that much. I did get a look at SMARTS. Hasn't changed that much either.
Remedy ARS. Yup! Changed a bit. But its getting HARDER to implement versus easier!
The one unsung hero in the NMS space - OpenNMS. Probably in more places than one would think. A Really active Developer community with great involvement. And its displacing alot of closed source product. And getting better every day.
Sales approach? None. OpenNMS is bought and implemented by the folks dealing with Managing the network. When it becomes engrained in the Infrastructure as a vital part of what they do, justification happens for maintenance and support.
With the Big 4, Products are sold and implemented from the Money down.
As far as NMS technology goes... What about:
Complex Event Processing models
Cause and Effect analytics within the platforms?
Migration toward Event Driven Architectures
a REAL ALIGNMENT of product and ITIL functionality
The migration away from log4j and the spewing of exceptions ad infinitum in app logs.
A REAL migration towards BI integration into ENMS platforms
The return of OPEN Framework platforms.
The return of the realization that nothing works "good enough" right after install. It must be massaged and fit to your environment. (Regardless of what the product does right out of the box!)
Situation Awareness
Advancement of Correlation technology.
Return of Apps that run in alot less memory than they do now. (Remeber CiscoView of old versus the Java pig out there now?)
Well, there you go! There are still a few of us Techno-Dweebs out there plugging away and trying to do good things.
-- Dougie!!! --
Re: What Ever Happened To Network Management?
Dennis you have a very valid question.
Having worked for two market-leading management software companies over the last six years, experience has taught that even the best intentions and resource support to innovate inside of big companies can get choked. As a result, most large companies plan innovation as a decision between build, buy or partner, with feature extensions more common for internal development and step function improvements coming through partnering or direct acquisition.
Well always see innovation come from smaller focused companies that have the freedom to respond to specific market needs and create opportunities that cant be seen in a spreadsheet. Small companies arent harnessed by big company constraints to innovation (roadmap bias, organizational boundaries, resource silos, financially-driven even Wall Street led decision making, etc.). Its the stuff we see outlined in Clayton Christensens, The Innovators Dilemma (www.claytonchristensen.com).
In the case of network management, what used to be an overlay architecture for the WAN infrastructure and the Private Network (LAN) that were designed to provide data (IP) and voice (analog) only running over separate networks, has now evolved into one IP-based network architecture delivering voice, video, data applications, services, etc .each application requiring very complex technical network requirements for security and SLAs. Strong and complete innovation into one management solution for a complex system like that is not likely.
To realize the benefits your comments are searching for, it remains the responsibility of the framework and management platform companies to integrate the technologies that a buy and partner innovation model fosters, and deliver whole product value to their customers, their shareholders, their partners and the future market. They need to lead the standards and integration efforts, to make it easy for innovators to build against their platform with integrated views, workflows and data models whatever it takes to help external innovation become successful. After all, their customers are dependent on them to lead.
Sadly, the incumbents remain held hostage by their business-unit orientations and the self-interest of the managers who are incented to optimize their product line revenues and profits. Its why CA and BMC have long been criticized as holding companies and where products go to die, which is a shame to see given their potential to lead and dominate. Its hard to prove to the CEO and the Board how integration investments generated revenue last quarter. It takes brave and focused senior leadership teams to drive for the long run profits and platform and category dominance true integration brings.
In the meantime, well likely see a lot of feature overlap by point software products, especially in areas where the barriers to entry are low, as we see in pure-play management software today (proven by the length of the list in your post).
Where there is potential for disruptive changes to occur by taking a whole product view to the problem (like Riverbed merging branch office production functions), well continue to see innovation and market share increases grow rapidly, while market share leader incumbents stuck in their prior points of view will remain focused on easy revenue with adjacent features, but dont fundamentally change the approach to the problem.
For the innovators and their customers and investors, thats good news.
Re: What ever happened to network management?
Dennis you have a very valid question.
Having worked for two market-leading management software companies over the last six years, experience has taught that even the best intentions and resource support to innovate inside of big companies can get choked. As a result, most large companies plan innovation as a decision between build, buy or partner, with feature extensions more common for internal development and step function improvements coming through partnering or direct acquisition.
Well always see innovation come from smaller focused companies that have the freedom to respond to specific market needs and create opportunities that cant be seen in a spreadsheet. Small companies arent harnessed by big company constraints to innovation (roadmap bias, organizational boundaries, resource silos, financially-driven even Wall Street led decision making, etc.). Its the stuff we see outlined in Clayton Christensens, The Innovators Dilemma (www.claytonchristensen.com).
In the case of network management, what used to be an overlay architecture for the WAN infrastructure and the Private Network (LAN) that were designed to provide data (IP) and voice (analog) only running over separate networks, has now evolved into one IP-based network architecture delivering voice, video, data applications, services, etc .each application requiring very complex technical network requirements for security and SLAs. Strong and complete innovation into one management solution for a complex system like that is not likely.
To realize the benefits your comments are searching for, it remains the responsibility of the framework and management platform companies to integrate the technologies that a buy and partner innovation model fosters, and deliver whole product value to their customers, their shareholders, their partners and the future market. They need to lead the standards and integration efforts, to make it easy for innovators to build against their platform with integrated views, workflows and data models whatever it takes to help external innovation become successful. After all, their customers are dependent on them to lead.
Sadly, the incumbents remain held hostage by their business-unit orientations and the self-interest of the managers who are incented to optimize their product line revenues and profits. Its why CA and BMC have long been criticized as holding companies and where products go to die, which is a shame to see given their potential to lead and dominate. Its hard to prove to the CEO and the Board how integration investments generated revenue last quarter. It takes brave and focused senior leadership teams to drive for the long run profits and platform and category dominance true integration brings.
In the meantime, well likely see a lot of feature overlap by point software products, especially in areas where the barriers to entry are low, as we see in pure-play management software today (proven by the length of the list in your post).
Where there is potential for disruptive changes to occur by taking a whole product view to the problem (like Riverbed merging branch office production functions), well continue to see innovation and market share increases grow rapidly, while market share leader incumbents stuck in their prior points of view will remain focused on easy revenue with adjacent features, but dont fundamentally change the approach to the problem.
For the innovators and their customers and investors, thats good news.
Agree, sort of.
Hey Dennis,
Great article - couldn't help myself from commenting here. I will grant you that the vendor landscape is muddled - a function of the enormous void that the "traditional" players have left in their wake, as they rushed to lump Network Management into a braoder IT management framework, and forgot how to deliver actual value. So, a bunch of companies are coming in to fill that value void. However, I think you overstate the number of viable alternatives, and give too much credit to niche network management capabilities. It's still a game of managing performance & availability in a way that delivers value for the time & effort expended, and only a small number of the vendors you mention (and of course, SolarWinds is at the top of this list) are doing that.
-Kenny
Not sure what yor point is on why NMS is lost.
Micromuse products are going strong at IBM. They have been re-branded as Tivoli and they are also offering entry edition versions for SMB.
I was not crazy about the EMC/Smart acquisition however I have not heard any complaints from my customers.
Also, you failed to mention the bright spots. OpenNMS and Zenoss are proving exciting solutions in the open source area for NMS.
johnmwillis.com
http://www.johnmwillis.com/
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