This week’s article "Virtualization Management: Time to Get Serious" on Information Week is a great read. It covers many important topics, raises key questions, and provides good background data that any IT Management executive building virtualization tools will find useful. Here are some interesting points to consider –

• "More than half of the survey respondents who’ve embraced virtualization rely on the built-in tool provided by their hypervisor vendor, whether it’s VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, or someone else. This leaves them with two sets of tools to manage–one for the physical servers and one for the virtual environment. Only 10% of organizations have invested the time and money to implement a server management system that provides a single framework. The rest either use legacy tools that don’t adequately handle a virtual environment, or they’re doing nothing at all."

• "The decision for most companies naturally comes back to how much they can rely on the tools of the virtualization vendors themselves. VMware and Citrix have solid tools for managing their environments, and they’re perfect for the initial deployment and setup. But eventually the rest of the operations must be integrated, especially as virtualization moves beyond the server to infrastructure and desktops. In addition, mixed platforms are the reality. VMware still dominates, but a whopping 64% of organizations use or plan to use more than one vendor’s hypervisor."

If these data points represent the broader market (since we don’t know the sample composition) – it indicates that there is a lot of room for growth for multi-vendor virtualization management capabilities. Eventually, as organizations move towards managing not only the infrastructure but also the “Service” – specialist tools would need to interact (via federation) or completely give way to consolidated platforms that can bring together an end-to-end view.

What strikes us most with some players that are active in this space – is the level of innovation in tools that is occurring in the sub $ 5,000 category targeted at small and mid size organizations.

For larger enterprises the innovation spectrum has already moved on to automation and policy management via virtual machine and resource orchestration. The adaptive/ dynamic world is finally here – and IT management needs to get smarter, simpler and more embedded into the active intervention process.
 

- Ronnie

First a few words on MarketPlane. The last year has been great, but 2010 promises to be even better. We have worked across multiple markets and dimensions - commercial and open source software, SMB and Enterprise, traditional media and new Social media, and  from strategy to demand generation. No doubt we have learnt a lot of new things on the way and delivered some excellent results.

Now to the topic that the next quest on the IT Management front is really about making things simpler. Enterprise IT tools have gotten big, complex and bloated. In a way, CIO’s and IT executives are looking to drive down that complexity through automation, correlation and even new business models – like open source software. When enterprise IT Management tools configuration cost millions of dollars of professional services for each effort, it’s the vendor and system integrators that laugh their way to the bank – not the customer.

On the SMB side, they have traditionally done things simpler, but the inherent complexity and dynamic nature of the new applications and infrastructure cannot be dealt with in the same way. Their challenge is to move to a higher order management without compromising on their ability to manage their environment with a few people – wearing multiple hats of network, server, app or even security expert based on the need. Remarkably, the tool box in the  SMB arsenal is starting to look like that of a larger business. SMB’s have graduated well beyond basic network, server and application monitoring to include integrated traffic monitoring, configuration management, virtualization management, network security, event log monitoring and in some cases helpdesk management as part of one suite from one vendor. And this without the complexity and labor intensive configuration required for larger tools.

Sounds surprising? We were too at the beginning, but the innovation at the bottom of the IT management pyramid is real and accelerating.  Larger organizations may have a thing or two to learn from here – that can give them some templates as to how they can simplify their complicated, siloed and specialist-driven management model to a lower cost, generalist model. In fact, in our experience MSP’s were already leveraging this kind of multi-skilled architecture – and it’s the turn of enterprises to take a closer look. We had a good discussion on this subject with Jim Metzler last week and there were other  interesting observations that will be part of a future webinar.

For the above to happen, legacy enterprise IT Management tools need to get way simpler compared to where they are today. If they don’t customers will find other alternatives  - from among the many SMB tools that are becoming capable to address mid-tier enterprise scale problems, as also from newer startups that are starting with a clean slate to address some of the perennial enterprise IT Management issues.

- Ronnie

In a move that will reverberate in the strategy think tanks of the other Big 5 Enterprise Systems and Network Management vendors (HP, IBM, BMC and latest entrant EMC) – CA announced the acquisition of privately held NetQoS. NetQoS’s technology provides CA the smarts to detect individual application level traffic, diagnostic and response data based on deep packet inpection (DPI) technology. It also provides a strong NetFlow reporting solution that will most likely replace the weaker capability that CA acquired as part of its Concord Communications acquistion in 2005. Similarly it will also beef up CA’s VoIP management offerings - along with the experienced development team that NetQoS had picked up enmasse from a NetIQ restructuring some years back.

Continue reading NetQoS Acquired by CA

Yes, it can be done. Social Media Marketing (SMM) is not a black hole in the marketing budget. And if you haven’t already started, its not too late to begin now. We see SMM everywhere and we see it done successfully. From our own work and conversations with clients and prospects, case studies we’ve seen at conferences, to blog posts and articles we’ve read – many B2B companies are finding their investment in social media marketing well worth the results. So much so, that budget for traditional forms of outbound marketing are shrinking, as investment in SMM is growing.

Are there exceptions? Should everyone jump on the bandwagon? The few exceptions we’ve seen so far include high-ticket item software companies with a finite list of customers (echoed by a ReadWriteWeb article). But for the vast majority of B2B software companies, social media marketing can work – and it can do wonders for lead generation, brand awareness, and customer loyalty, if executed with a well defined strategy.

Continue reading How to Make B2B Social Media Marketing Pay Off

As you know, Social media is seeping into new facets of our life literally every day. In fact it has walked into your living room, without you probably noticing it. Right on your HDTV screen! Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and a gamut of other popular applications are available on your TV screens for a combined social experience where you are not only watching your favorite TV program, or Internet video but also staying connected with friends, family and contacts at the same time.

Continue reading Social Media Walks Into Your Living Room

An intriguing question came up in a discussion this week. Why do specialist IT management companies fare relatively poorly as compared to generalist solution providers? This is counterintuitive but is mostly true with some exceptions. Economic logic should dictate that specialist companies garner a higher premium because of the sophistication of what they do. But that logic does not hold unless other economic and business process factors are favorable as we shall see below.
 
Continue reading Micro Segmentation : The Bane of IT Management Specialists

As B2B tech marketing consultants, we spend a good deal of our time talking to companies about their product marketing strategies. Many companies we talk to are already engaged in social media marketing, however, a fair number are not. In most cases, these companies “plan to do social media marketing”, but haven’t had the time or resources to get a program off the ground. At this point in the conversation, we explain the value of doing  a thorough review of their marketing audience, objectives and metrics, in order to develop a social media ROI analysis. Essentially, the ROI analysis is a forecast of what a social media campaign would return, based on their marketing objectives.Without this stepping stone it would be hard to know where to go next.

Yet, as we allude to in our blog topic, typically the response from many a company is “OK. We hear you, but we’re still not ready to launch a program. Is there something we can do now without committing lots of time and resources? At a minimum, what social media marketing should we do?” Well, we’ve heard this question so many times it seemed worthwhile to share our thoughts in a blog post.

Continue reading “At a minimum, what social media marketing should we do?”

A recent article in the latest Harvard Business Review that focuses on Innovation in Turbulent Times set us thinking (full article available on subscription). What balance of right brain vs. left brain thinking do product manager’s in IT management companies need?

Granted that most often ‘right-brain’ creativity is associated with the design of consumer products where color, style, usability and other kinds of sensory appeal are paramount. The HBR article gives numerous examples of right brain and left brain partnerships in the consumer sector and especially so in the fashion industry. No doubt Steve Jobs is the iconic right-brain leader in the tech industry.
 
Continue reading Product Management : The Right and Left Brain Balance

The News in IT Management and Beyond is a column in our bimonthly MarketPlane newsletter. We’re including it as a blog post, because of it’s broad appeal to the tech community.

CA Acquires Assets of Cassatt    We covered the demise of Cassatt a few weeks ago. And now in the final act of the story, some of the technology assets of Cassatt around datacenter automation and policy based planning have been acquired by CA for an undisclosed amount. This should bolster CA’s data center automation product and their cloud play.  

New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets  Some interesting research from a Harvard Business School graduate student at reveals some surprising facts. Of relevance to marketing – more than half of Twitter users have tweeted only once. In fact 10% of prolific Twitterers accounted for 90% of the Tweets in this sample – which equates to less than half the percentage of “Creators” in Forrester’s Social Technographic Profile for 2008. It took some time for blogs to reach critical mass – so this is trending in the right direction. And as for the gender differences in Twitter usage, and patterns in who follows whom… read on.  

Continue reading The News in IT Management and Beyond 6/3/09

Circa 2008-2009 has clearly been a challenging time for most companies across all sectors of the economy. While the performance of financial stocks have oscillated wildly in response to governmental action, tech companies have seen lesser volatility (at least from a Apr 08 – Mar 09 perspective). Note that all financial terms used here have their usual meaning.

We were curious to find out how  IT management companies as a broad sector (measured by the average performance of 10 mostly pure play management vendors – OPNT, QSFT, CA, BMC, BCSI, CPWR, KEYN, SWI, NTCT, RVBD) did over the past year (trailing twelve months). Also, how their performance fared against the Big 6 IT majors (HPQ, IBM, MSFT, ORCL, EMC, CSCO).
 
Continue reading IT Management Companies Outshine Tech Bellwether’s over Last 12 Months