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Links for December 16th through December 17th

Answers are in the cloud

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.

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