Stories about: Opsware

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.

Even by the bloated standards of high-tech mergers and acquisitions, Microsoft's proposed purchase of Yahoo appears to be the largest ever among technology firms. It is certainly Microsoft's largest. The company mostly buys smaller firms for less than a billion dollars to fill in gaps in its product lineup. But that may be changing. Last year, for instance, Microsoft bought Seattle online advertising firm aQuantive for US$6 billion, its largest ever until the long-rumored Yahoo deal was unveiled on Friday.

The world of business software continued its inexorable march toward Total Consolidation in 2007. If IBM was off the mark in 1943 when it (supposedly) predicted a world with only five computers, it might have better luck today with a similar prediction about the software industry.

In 2007,we designated more than 90 start-ups as worth watching. After a second look, we picked these 10 as offering what matters most in the enterprise -- agility, seamless integration and pervasive connectivity.

Data center managers who championed virtualization and green computing in 2007 now face the task of delivering the benefits they promised -- something industry watchers say will be no small feat.

At SunTrust, a major bank with US$182 billion in assets, network executives had the blues. Although mergers and acquisitions had boosted the bank's branch and ATM presence across the Southeast, they had created a network-management morass.

Today's IT departments need to do more, with less budget. They need to rapidly develop and deploy new applications. They need to build a flexible infrastructure--one that can rapidly adjust to the needs of the business. There are many key benefits inherent in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Count HP CEO Mark Hurd among those who believe the tech industry could be on the cusp of another major wave of consolidation.

The number of pure-play network change and configuration-management vendors decreased again as EMC announced it had purchased Voyence for an undisclosed amount.

Service-oriented architecture promises many positives: resource reuse, application integration, business agility and infrastructure flexibility, among others. But never do SOA proponents claim ease of management as one of the technology's glories.

NetIQ has introduced software the company says will help enterprise IT managers automate processes around network and security operations and distributed application performance management.