IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » July 2007

July 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Managing in the Open: The Next Wave of Systems Management

TAGS: Open Source

The 451 Group today announced a new report titled "Managing in the Open: The Next Wave of Systems Management." The main finding seems to be a recurring theme - "...the 'Big Four' systems management vendors (BMC, HP, IBM, and CA) are ripe for a shake-up from open source systems management players." For more info about the report, go here.

Gartner also touched on this theme back in April.

Open source network and systems monitoring and management vendors have been beating the drum with this message for a number of quarters. Customer traction and 3rd party analyst validation only strengthens their case.

Posted by Harper Mann on July 30, 2007 03:40 PM

July 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Emerging management challengers to the Big 4

TAGS: Open Source

Network World's Denise Dubie recently wrote an article on emerging management challengers to the Big 4 (HP, IBM, CA, BMC). In it, Will Cappelli, research vice president at Gartner, said "The biggest story around the big four...is how they will compete against Microsoft, Oracle, EMC, SAP and Symantec, which are moving more aggressively into the management market. This is already happening. Right now the big four still dominate the market, but have lost crucial domains to Microsoft and the Oracle domain is being challenged."

Denise goes on to ask the reader "Which large, established vendors could persuade you to forget about the big four and focus your infrastructure management investment elsewhere? And why? What about these vendors makes you think they can also tackle management better for your environment?"

I thought this would be an interesting question to pose to Michael Coté, RedMonk software industry analyst, and confessed systems management junkie. In addition to asking Coté, "Are companies such as EMC, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Symantec a threat to the Big 4?" I added a follow-up—"Do you think open source management / monitor firms will be gobbled up by larger players or play any part in this discussion?" Here are his thoughts...

"Microsoft is definitely a contender, though 1-3 years out. They're in year 4 of their 10 year plan. That said, their plan seems good. Once they ship a hyper-visor with all their OSes AND get that widely spread, things could get very interesting and in their favor.

"I don't know enough about Oracle to comment. I know they 'do stuff' in this area, but they're rarely at the top of my mind except in the ambitious area. The problem with application companies doing IT management is that they favor their stack instead being truly heterogeneous. Microsoft wrestles with this problem as you can imagine. IBM is an interesting exception, but they're such a mega-company that you have to look at their different software brands (DB2, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli) as being part of a holding company. While Oracle and SAP are huge, they tend to try and stick all their software under one tent/architecture ( i.e., Fusion and NetWeaver) rather than take the more loosely coupled approach that IBM does.

"Obviously, I think the open source folks, such as GroundWork, Zenoss, and Hyperic, have a chance to be one of these 'emerging management challengers' as well. I suspect that if/when one of them becomes successful, there'll be a lot more sniffing around for acquisition by one of the Big 4.

"EMC, by way of VMWare, is another interesting one. Whoever controls the majority of virtualization technology in the future will have a huge chance for doing a lot of IT management tooling. We'll see what happens post-IPO.

"Symantec is interesting, but I think they'd need to partner acquire, or be acquired by someone to fully built up their presence. They have mega-brand value in the mid-market with their Anti-Virus and Norton brands. That brand value could be extended if there was a good mid-market technology and execution.

"The major potential threat to IT management is a mass move to SaaS based applications. While it's sort of pie-in-the-sky, to my mind, the only 'real' thing holding back large enterprises from going SaaS is a culture change. If the collective pool of enterprise thinking suddenly thought that SaaS was OK, I could see lots of people switching over email, ERP, and other things. This is the sort of dream we have every 5 years or so (we called it 'ASP' and 'managed service' last), so we'll see how this go at it goes. The keys this time are (a.) getting companies to accept simple solutions rather than feature-ful ones, and, (b.) a possible generational shift in what 'IT means' once all the MySpace/FaceBook/WhizBang 2.0 people enter middle-management or, at least, start more heavily influencing IT spend."

Posted by Harper Mann on July 26, 2007 09:34 AM

July 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Tired Programmers

TAGS: Open Source

I've picked up an interesting new book called The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. Aside from addressing the essential—yet rarely asked—question: what do you really want from life?, the book suggests that you can outsource parts of your life so you can be more efficient about delivering work results.

This has relevance to coders in a development group. I know some really good programmers who are tired. Really tired. They work at a start-up and service any and all requests from sales to fix customer problems. These requests arrive fast, furious, at random intervals and are basically one-off tasks that are customer specific.

While these tasks are great for staying "sticky" with the customers, scaling this kind of business is next to impossible. I'm sure this is always a trade-off in a product where the general cases are only so interesting to specific customers, but the custom work is just not scalable. It’s a staple for Open Source companies, because when the software is “free,” support services are often the most valuable product. So, how do you balance servicing customer requests directly but still capture general solutions that can be rolled into a product for general sale? Do you put your best programmers on the customer tasks or do you put them on the main product so you can evolve the foundation? How do you get the most bang?

Posted by Harper Mann on July 25, 2007 09:27 AM

July 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

When Software Won't Talk

TAGS: Open Source

As I mentioned a few days ago, if you’re having trouble getting your software to talk to other software, you probably need to take a look at the culture of the company that wrote it.

If the company culture is a top-down hierarchical environment (and I’m not pointing any fingers), this could be the root of the problem in getting the software result you want. The top-down, hierarchical environment tends to stifle cross communication, which is inherently creative, and it can't avoid the "telephone game effect" where information goes through 12 people before whatever is left of the it arrives wherever it ends up.

What's needed is peer-to-peer communication, which reflects the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet and collaboration inherent in Web 2.0. Part of the reason that Open Source exists was the rise of the Internet and the breaking down of barriers between engineers at various companies. When they started talking, the Internet and all other software as well got better. Internet growth is driven by Open Source software that’s able to collaborate with other software. This is true of monitoring software as well--it has to be able to talk to the systems it's monitoring. So, next time your programs aren't playing nice at a customer site, check your organizational comm lines. They may need tuning!

Posted by Harper Mann on July 19, 2007 11:41 AM

July 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Software issues? Consider the source.

TAGS: Open Source

Software reflects the organization. The culture of a business vertical, the culture of the company doing the business, and the culture of the software engineering department within the company materially affect how software is designed, written, tested, deployed and maintained. Where software is involved, paying attention to the culture is absolutely critical.

Software is only as good as how it works within its production environment. One of the advantages of Open Source is its broader community with lots of feedback for how it functions in various environments with various users. Open Source engineers code defensively because they know their community, know they will need to provide enabling access to users and other programmers who will fit the project into their own needs. They know there is huge advantage to working together. Open Source projects are not successful if they are myopic. They have to be collaborative. This is in contrast to a "my way or the highway" attitude embedded into the big 4 monitoring tools.

What prompted me about this was kind of surprise. I was talking to a buddy at another small software company who was moaning about how hard it was to get his IT search engine tool to get logs from CA Unicenter. Sounds simple enough, but he spent 3 weeks back and forth with CA support trying to use the CA interface that would provide the logs and never got it fully working. My buddy is strong with the force technically. His product is a Java / Apache stack and promiscuous in its ability to pull data from logs, ports, etc. CA support tried hard to help him, they were great, but he couldn't get what he needed from Unicenter. What's up with that?

Posted by Harper Mann on July 16, 2007 05:11 PM