Strategic Vision: Giga Information Group on... ebusiness

Ebusiness has unquestionably enhanced the importance of IT organisation and strategy this enhancement has, however, come with a twofold price.

Firstly, the importance of IT has meant greater scrutiny of the quality of IT services as perceived by the end user and, even more importantly, the customer. Secondly, ebusiness technologies vastly increase the complexity of configuration and application architectures. This is not only because it expands the range of functionality on offer but also because it links together many historically discrete computer and network components into tangled, multilayered lattice.

In general, it is impossible to do a good job of managing the quality of IT service unless systems and network administrators can get a reasonable picture of what is taking place within the infrastructure and application portfolio. The new ebusiness-induced complexity, however, appears to make that latter task all but impossible to perform. In other words, just when it has become more important than ever to manage service levels, a prerequisite for successful service level management seems nearly impossible to achieve.

The need for effective systems and network management has been long appreciated, even if it was largely ignored in the early days of the client/server revolution. Today, it is possible to choose from a variety of solutions that claim to offer end-to-end management (Computer Associates, IBM/Tivoli) or vital, extensible partial solutions to the end-to-end management problem (BMC, HP, and a host of others). Until recently, however, none of the major vendors in this space directly addressed either the management of the end user/customer's perception of service levels or the intricacies of an ebusiness enabled infrastructure.

A number of smaller, mostly start up, vendors (Jyra Research, FirstSense Software) leapt into the breach, particularly in the area of measuring end-user response time and availability but lacking true integration with a Tivoli Enterprise or a Unicenter TNG meant that the value of these latter offerings was limited.

All of this is poised to change over the next three months. Recognising the potential damage to their respective market positions, the major network and systems management vendors have all recognised the inadequacy of their current offerings to the new situation created by ebusiness. Indeed, we fully expect that by year end, CA, Tivoli, HP, and BMC will each, in their own way, recreate themselves as ebusiness management vendors.

While of course the quality of their enhanced offerings will vary and the costs associated with implementation will undoubtedly be significant, IT organisations should welcome this 'change of heart' with a sigh of relief.

Successful ebusiness is predicated by effective network and systems management and, at last, the network and systems management vendor community have awoken, however reluctantly, to the challenge.

* Will Cappelli is one of Giga's most experienced analysts, and specialises in the areas of outsourcing, service management, and network and systems management technologies. Will has 16 years of experience in the IT industry, serving in research, management and business development positions in a number of major IT consultancies and research houses, including Ovum, Meta Group and Gartner Group. He has published articles and books on a wide range of IT subjects, ranging from chargeback architectures to parallel processing.