Infrastructure Management Report

We have also found in compiling this Report that the same customer names appear as customers of more than one vendor. This can mean either a customer has found that deployment of a solution was too great a commitment and abandoned any further implementation, or they have adopted a best-of-breed approach.

This latter course of action is to be expected with clients of Managed Objects or SMARTS, due to the architecture of their solutions. Managed Objects' solution concentrates solely at the top layer of the architecture, and SMARTS, with its Service Assurance Management module, also works at the top layer. There is an increasing requirement for solutions in the top layer of Butler Group's BLIP architecture. The demand from the market, coupled with players such as Managed Objects entering this market space, has awoken many vendors to this requirement, and some already have offerings that they say addresses this demand, although some are still struggling to come to grips with a coherent solution.

Future Requirements

Butler Group also believes that the shape of the market will change with an increased emphasis on the management of security. This is also becoming complex and the need is there for solutions that carry out this function. Some vendors already have modules that tightly integrate with their Infrastructure Management solutions, and we see that this will become a growing trend.

In addition for the need to build more intelligence into solutions to cope with current technology, there is a need to incorporate the management of emerging technology into products. Some vendors have already made moves to incorporate the management of Web services into their solutions. There is also going to be a major requirement for Infrastructure Management capabilities to manage the intricacies of Grid computing and autonomic computing. IBM Tivoli already claims that it has incorporated autonomic computing capabilities into some of its products.