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 –

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In our last post we looked at the drivers behind the growth in datacenter power consumption and the efforts by some of the major IT players to rein that in. In this post we will take a look at the innovative new startups that are at the forefront of the greening of IT management. Notable [...]

Traditionally, IT management has focused on optimizing the use of hardware equipment and software while paying little attention to the cost of facilities, power and cooling. Understandably so, as funding for facilities came from a different part of the IT budget and did not directly impact application or systems teams. Likewise, none of the major IT management applications possess [...]

We are seeing a number of recent announcements on enabling IT management products for MSP’s. While software sales at the top of the heap are getting squeezed given the shrinkage in capex budgets, small and mid size businesses and enterprises are outsourcing the management of their infrastructure to MSP’s as an exercise in cost-cutting. In fact, according [...]

The application testing and automated software quality (ASQ) sector has quietly undergone a metamorphosis over the past decade. It’s a classic case study in industry consolidation via vertical integration.
At the beginning of the decade the ASQ industry – especially for distributed systems was populated with standalone players.