The IT Management Vendor Landscape Becomes More Cloudy
Virtualisation in the data center clearly requires management…and in particular it heightens the importance of clear and precise technology or business service context – see for example Does B-hive Acquisition Make VMware a Cloud Vendor? in which James Staten, principal analyst with Forrester Research, “lauds another feature of B-hive’s Conductor — its ability to map dependencies among different VM’s that make up a business process. Calling dependency mapping the biggest problem with high availability, Staten says “you may do HA services or clustering or fast re-start for a particular application, but usually a business process involves multiple applications, and not knowing what those dependencies are is problematic.”
But does this present an opportunity for the big 4 Systems Management vendors (HP, CA, IBM, BMC) to subsume the virtualisation management startups (see Oedipus meets IT management?) or in fact a chance for purveyors of fine virtualisation hypervisor technologies (Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Oracle, Sun etc) to capitalise on this significant disruption to eat the somewhat comfortable Big 4 from within?