Telecom Lead Australia: Disruptive technologies such as
virtualization, automation, and cloud computing have raised the profile of the
infrastructure management (IM) vendor solutions as the need for management and
control begins to cross over from a purely technical realm to a more
business-focused activity, says the latest Decision Matrix from research firm
Ovum.
Ultimately CIOs will become chief integration officers,
responsible for matching the wide selection of IT sources to demands from
customers,” said Roy Illsley, principal analyst at Ovum. The biggest challenge
facing this role will be to understand what each IM vendor’s vision is for the
future and how this translates to their plans for the organization.”
Infrastructure management solutions need to include a
higher-level management perspective on the cost, value, risk, and flexibility
aspects of delivering IT services, according to Ovum.
The top ten players in the IM market are categorized into
Leaders, Challengers and Followers. The IM market is splitting into two
distinct segments catering for two different groups of organizations – ‘just
enough’ management by small and medium-sized organizations, and service
assurance by large enterprises.
Leader in IM solutions include CA Technologies, HP, IBM,
and VMware. They all demonstrate capability of providing excellent siloed
solutions, and have new, more heterogeneous cloud-enabled solutions and visions
for how future infrastructure management will evolve.
The needs of IM solutions are amplified by the
significance of IT to the organization. Where IT is a competitive
differentiator, service assurance is of greater value, but if IT is seen as a
cost of doing business, ‘just enough’ is better aligned.
The IM vendor landscape is dynamic with acquisitions and
disposals. While EMC’s sale of assets to VMware has propelled VMware into the
Leader category, Dell’s increased capability from acquiring Kace and Scalent
has meant it now meets Ovum’s ODM inclusion criteria.
Another trend impacting the IM vendor space is the change
in the approach and focus of all vendors to the role of the management layer.
For example, Symantec believes the security and operations alignment movement
is an approach to enable greater flexibility, while Microsoft has chosen to
build a large partner community to provide ‘plug-in’ modules to its core
offering to provide the same objective.
All vendors in the ODM share a vision that
infrastructure management will become the critical technology for organizations
to operate effectively and enable business agility, but the approaches to how
this will be achieved differ. This is a sign of a healthy market in which the
customer will decide which are mainstream and which are niche,” Illsley added.
