Systems management
tools
Rising
to meet changing business needs
By Mary Raitt
Jordan
In the wake of the dot-com meltdown on Wall Street, those in the systems management
software market say a phoenix is rising out of the ashes. Phenomenal business
growth opportunities are being experienced by those who offer ailing or
budget-stricken companies the solace of smarter, more cost-efficient software
and services to stay on top of the critical networks vital to healthy
e-business initiatives.
David Hochhauser, VP of marketing infrastructure solutions at Computer
Associates (CA), says his sources peg the infrastructure management market at
$30 billion this year, and that is expected to soar to $60 billion by 2005. To
him, what is happening is that the industry is leaping into a new era of
e-business. Companies are evolving beyond a simple Web page and are no longer
just satisfied with getting a handle on databases. Now firms are digging in
deep to integrate all aspects and procedures embedded in their business, from
suppliers and beyond.
"It is hard to find boundaries of the enterprise. The circle is expanding
outward," Hochhauser says. "Companies need managed services from
business to business. It's leading to an explosive demand."
CA itself is firing its engines on many fronts in enterprise, security and
storage management areas. Hochhauser says CA had a massive change in its
offerings recently, re-architecting a family of solutions and now offering more
than 30 choices in six areas to cater to individual needs. Hochhauser says
another area drawing CA's interest is in the area of Web services. Conductivity
and management of services in the Microsoft .NET and Java worlds will be
developed. Questions will be in integrating core processes automatically, in
real time.
Tom Hickman, senior product manager at Connected, agrees the growth is dynamic.
His company has seven new investors and doubled both its customer base and the
number of employees in one year. It just released Connected TLMs 6.0 with an
enhanced PC migration function, in addition to its back-up/retrieval, system
heal, auditing and remote assist capabilities.
Hochhauser says statistics point to almost all companies declaring business
over the Internet is, or will be, a core area for growth in goods and services.
Yet many still have to adapt to the new venue, and with growth comes pain.
Three major headaches businesses encounter hover around managing
extended enterprises (including wireless and remote issues); soaring customer
expectations with e-business; costs associated with keeping applications up and
running 24x7; and dealing with shortened time frames for deployment, a.k.a.
running on "Internet time." Mark Lowe, CEO of San Jose, Calif.-based
New Moon Systems, adds there is also the standard concern to reduce help desk
and PC support costs.
Sources say all of this is to be done with smaller budgets and staff, with the
goal of saving more money by gaining efficiency. Hickman says the
"irrational exuberance" in the prior software craze is being
tempered. CFOs have erased discretionary spending for IT projects and any
project usually has to have a model to prove it will save money in a calendar
year.
"Just because companies cut back on IT spending doesn't mean the workload
is getting any lighter," says Rick McNees, VP of marketing at Tempe,
Ariz.-based iTRACS, an infrastructure management software provider.
"Customers are watching cash management closely and doing some belt-tightening
to be sure. There are staff cutbacks, leaving those who remain to work smarter
and harder. The stress on IT is that people have to do more with less and there
is continued demand."
iTRACS signed a deal with CA to integrate its solution with CA's Unicenter to
provide a better systems management solution. McNees says 70 percent of LAN
problems and technical outages are related to cabling. He additionally quotes a
Gartner study, which he says points to 59 percent of networking problems being
related to physical infrastructure issues. He says iTRACS gets down to the
physical layer with cabling to probe and monitor any changes in connections to
pinpoint a problem-very handy to deal with when there are thousands of ports in
remote locations, or in huge environments like bank buildings. Any changes
within the cables can be configured to a customer's request and escalated to
appropriate action.
Customers
have plenty of standard and evolving demands on systems management software.
Sources say customers look for help in job scheduling, service level management
requests, and keeping applications running seamlessly. There is also a distinct
need for data protection.
Hickman says the Windows 2000 migration may have been for some the most
difficult software deployment en masse, starting first with the servers. Now,
he says, 50-66 percent of U.S. enterprises will make a big push in desktop/laptop
migrations in the coming months.
Those migrations must happen quickly since the workforce predominantly relies
on their PCs. Any downtime is a loss of productivity to the enterprise, and
help desks are not always the speediest of solutions. More and more companies
are turning to enhanced, automated software for saving time and making life
easier.
According to Hickman, one pilot migration Connected did illustrated that a
typical four-hour migration with one IT person could be reduced to 30 minutes. Further
studies he reviewed pointed to a 30 to 50 percent savings by a migration taking
place with sufficient software, compared to being done manually.
"Root-cause analysis is a fun, intellectual process. But the quickest,
easiest way to get a system back up and running will mean the most to our
customers. Who cares what broke? It's more important to get it fixed
immediately. The user can often initiate the solution themselves. We take the
diagnosis phase out of the loop for them," says Hickman.
Buying what you need
Since some companies suffer from resource constraints more than others,
software providers have adapted by offering modularized stand-alone offerings
so people can buy what they need as they can afford it.
Often the ROI is fairly quick, sources say. CA had one customer that achieved
an ROI in 55 days. Companies say managing a system centrally contains much of
the cost since help doesn't have to be dispatched to far-flung locations and
satellite offices.
Chanchal Samanta, CTO at Cambridge, Mass-based Availant, a provider of
availability management software and services, says in systems management
people are funding solutions that are not exactly meeting their needs. Many buy
blind.
"There are a lot of players, it can be expensive to buy, improvements can
be marginal, and in some cases it can make the support people work
harder," says Samanta.
Samanta says Availant's customers wanted something easy to use and effective at
meeting SLAs. Availant offered an automated solution right out of the box. The
product can observe the system internally and apply proactive corrective action
and notification.
In July, Availant announced the completion of a joint software engineering
effort with IBM for the development of the latest release of High Availability
Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP)
for AIX. Since 1990, Availant and IBM have been engaged in a technology
partnership for design and development of HACMP for AIX, IBM's
high-availability clustering software.
Dalle Allaire, director of strategic communication, SilverBack Technologies |
Cost is truly a consideration for some, says Dale Allaire,
director of strategic communication at SilverBack Technologies, a Billerica,
Mass-based management software and service provider that integrates network,
systems and application monitoring software into its solution, InfoCare.
SilverBack is also a founding member of the MSP Association, an international
industry consortium formed to define, shape and promote the emerging managed
network services sector to aid in accelerating the adoption of MSPs.
Allaire says InfoCare helps mid-sized enterprises manage IT computing
environments, avoid downtime, and provide service by delivering information on
faults, assets, performance and security across networks, systems and
applications. "It's a software solution with a service component,"
says Allaire.
The problem, according to Allaire, is that some customers do not have the
resources, or skill sets, to get the job done. Quoting a META Group study, he
says for every $1 spent in software there is an estimated $3.50 spent in
deployment costs.
Silverback's software and tools are in an appliance that is placed in the data
center. It can assess information to front-line network managers, planners and
executive management via a Web-based portal.
"Companies need a proactive alert system that knows things are about to
keel over before they do," says Allaire. "From our data center we are
a big eye, an umbilical cord to feed and update."
Bob Thaler, director of product marketing at Nashua-N.H.-based
Open Software Associates, a player in the software management and distribution
space, says customers should not necessarily have to buy new software and
hardware to solve problems. He says OSA's netDeploy Global can lay applications
on top of existing ones. He says an ROI in one case occurred in 13 days and the
customer was saving money in 30 days. That can happen by OSA's asset tracking,
reporting and management capabilities. It assesses what applications are being
used and how frequently-even by remote and mobile users.
"One software application might cost $39 and there may be 1,000 users, but
a big chunk of the budget is licensing and penalties. Companies should pay for
what they need to be current and useful, but cut extraneous costs," says
Thaler.
To New Moon's Lowe, if costs can be reduced, money is then made more available
to customers to funding special projects. Even though overall IT budgets are
about the same as last year (or a little more), roughly 80 percent sustain IT
operations and 20 percent go to special projects, according to Lowe.
To that end, New Moon released New Moon Canaveral iQ, an application management
platform that allows enterprises and service providers to distribute and manage
Windows-based applications. Canaveral can tackle and track costly and
time-consuming issues like upgrades, software licensing agreements and piracy
issues, among other things.
The
University of Calgary, which spends upward of $1 million a year in software,
was one beta tester to reap the rewards of Canaveral. Through its use, Dean
Berschl from the school was able to deploy and manage application services from
a centralized IT infrastructure to reduce costs and maintenance by streamlining
administrative operations.
Berschl says via Canaveral, software can now be distributed to its 55,000 full
and part-time students anywhere, even on their home computers. Money at the school
was tight, he said, and adding more machines to the existing 1,500 was not an
option. Students were forced to wait an hour or more to use them. Now students
can log in and get what they need in terms of software, and the school can meet
its educational objective without a large capital outlay.
For more
information, visit:
www.availant.com
www.ca.com
www.connected.com
www.infinibandta.org
www.infiniswitch.com
www.itracs.com
www.lane15.com
www.newmoon.com
www.osa.com
www.silverbacktech.com.