A little something extra…
I had the chance to catch up on my IT Management reading this afternoon. That’s “good old fashioned IT Management” as I like to call it – not pure cloud hoopla. Coincidentally, I had lunch with Mark Hinkle and Matt Ray, both of Zenoss. A few years ago, Zenoss, GroundWork, Hyperic and others were a rising set of open source based IT Management vendors that came onto the scene right around when I started at RedMonk. There were (and still are) others outside the usual startup road-shows like Nagios and OpenNMS, and non-OSS companies like Splunk. I even put together a competitive-type presentation on them, back in 2006.
While that bucket of companies and projects is still very interesting in the IT Management space, this past year some new companies of interest have emerged: Nimsoft, ManageEngine, AccelOps, Puppet (Reductive Labs), Chef (Opscode), and Service-now.com. The first three are classic monitoring and management products, the next two “next generation automation” companies cut from the same philosophic cloth, and the last a SaaS-based service desk and ITIL-y suite that’s gotten an amazing amount of BigCo adoption.
This isn’t some sort of “short list” at all. To be sure, there are many other companies, projects, and several outfits in the works. I just looked over a long list for a “systems management company of the year” contest in the works for SearchDataCenter.com that listed just over 30 companies, new and old in the space. As another example, in case you haven’t noticed Spiceworks is starting its inevitable climb up-market. While cloud computing has been going gang-busters and doesn’t seem set to stop, there’s been a revived interest in IT Management that makes the old systems management guy in my excited.
The Links
- ITSM Fusion 2010 Talk Submission – Deadline January 29, 2010
I went to this last year, it was pretty good if you're into the topic. There were *a lot* of sponsored and vendor centric talks. If you're thinking of presenting: getting cloud people to go sell to enterprise IT old schoolers would be interesting, as well as virtualization. - William Vambenepe — Oracle Real User Experience Insight 6.0
- Adventures in Open Source » Blog Archive » OpenNMS UCE 2010 Call for Papers
- A talk with Brandon Whichard about Zenoss, the cloud, Amazon's EC2 and more
- Spiceworks Heads Upstream And Abroad With Latest Update – Network Computing
These guys are set to go after medium to large businesses in 2010: multi-site monitoring, now up to 1,000 nodes, SQL Server monitoring, "over 800,000 registered users," help desk improvements (rules for routing and grouping tickets), network topology customizations. Impressive as always. - IBM to Acquire Lombardi
"My reaction is a bit different, and it reflects the comments we've been hearing from our customers: IBM already has too many BPM products, and a third one will only aggravate the situation. This acquisition might make sense if IBM intended to rationalize the products and create one leading-edge product that addresses all BPM use cases (e.g., human-centric, system-centric, document-centric, case-centric, etc). But it seems pretty clear that IBM has no intention to do so." - Martin Kuppinger: CapEx and OpEx – the latest thing in IT buzzwords
- A Tour of Puppet Dashboard 0.1.0 « Reductive Labs — the team behind Puppet, the open source leader in data center automation
- Free IT management software not just for the small shops anymore
- ComScore: Facebook Grew 5.6% in the US last month. Hitwise: “Facebook” Top US Search term
- iPhone developers abandoning app model for HTML5?
- Normob: is this the ugliest word not yet to enter the English language?
"The words we use to talk about people quickly come to constrain the ways we relate to them, so it’s with mounting alarm that I see the spread of the word 'normob' – a contraction of 'normal mobile user.'" - Withings – Withings – The WiFi Scale (weight, BMI, fat mass & lean mass) – Home
A scale with wifi. - Adobe financials and the future of packaged software
"Still, there is aspect of the above figures that rings alarm bells for me. They show no evidence that Adobe is able to migrate its business from one dependent on packaged software sales to one that is service-based. That is important, because I suspect that the packaged software model is in permanent decline." - Amazon adds media streaming to content delivery service
- Big three relational database vendors diverge on Hadoop
- Dell crunches numbers on Perot deal
- How Google became Microsoft: A decade of hits, misses and gaffes
- Moonlight 2 expands Silverlight capabilities for Linux
- ERP Rigidity – What Agresso Found Out – Key Factors
- ERP's Paralysis Problem and the Repercussions for Businesses Everywhere | CIO – Blogs and Discussion
"Survey respondents said that the inability to easily modify their ERP system deployments is disrupting their businesses by delaying product launches, slowing decision making and delaying acquisitions and other activities that ultimately cost them between $10 million and $500 million in lost opportunities." - IBM Buys Lombardi (it was bound to happen…)
"The battle for enterprise BPM is about engaging the business at enterprise scale, not just IT. It’s what Phil Gilbert has been preaching for years, and I don’t think IBM would have coughed up the money if they didn’t believe it, too. So the trick is melding Lombardi’s superior business-friendly tooling with IBM’s bulletproof backend and SOA. BPMN 2.0 will provide them a way to do that, so I think today’s positioning slides are just placeholders." - Tungle.blog: New at Tungle: Meeting Links!
This is pretty awesome. If you schedule meetings across firewalls, check out Tungle, man.
Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.
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