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