Examining the Cloud Management Software Phenomenon
One of IDC’s predictions for 2012 is big growth in cloud management software spending – 62% growth, in fact. And this follows growth of 91% in 2011 and 109% in 2010. Clearly, something is going on in this area and to explore it more fully I talked with Dennis Drogseth, vice president with the research and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates, who has been following the network and systems management space for many years.To determine which cloud management tool is best for you, Drogseth advises that you keep in mind what cloud is and what it’s intended to do. “The first biggest mistake is to assume that cloud is an end point to a journey,” he says. “It’s about facilitating good service management. If it’s approached from that perspective you can start making some good choices.”
For example, cloud management tools must be able to function across multiple domains. “Cloud doesn’t really just live in a systems-only space or network-only or applications-only,” he says. “For those organizations that are still very siloed – and quite a few are – cloud can be a real challenge in terms of planning and preparedness.”
A good cloud management tool should provide functions including service level management and user experience management, which Drogseth says is rising in prominence. “End point awareness of how a service is received is central, whether you’re using an external service or are on your own,” he says. Other areas that cloud management tools address include service desk, application dependency mapping and configuration management data base (CMDB).
Some cloud management tools help users optimize their environments, such as by determining the best platform for various application loads. “That’s clearly what many of them are trying to do and some of them do surprisingly well,” Drogseth says. “I’ve been pretty impressed with the speed at which vendors are at least trying to address that.”
Picking a platform will be a chore, simply because so many vendors play in the space, he says. All the big management platform vendors – BMC, CA, IBM and HP – have offerings, as do virtualization software vendors such as VMware. Companies including OpTier, Keynote and Compuware have all made investments in performance monitoring offerings that include cloud, he notes. “The list is almost endless because every vendor you talk to, probably more than 100, have something to say about cloud,” he says.
The vendors are focused on integrating their tools with existing network and systems management applications – a very good thing. “Certainly fundamentally that’s the direction,” Drogseth says. “One really can’t expect to optimize the cloud investment if what you see in the cloud lives in one universe and what you see in the rest lives in another.”
Click below to hear my full conversation with Drogseth and learn more about cloud management tools.
