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The Ones to Watch
How are systems management and application management changing? Which vendors are leading the charge? The 451 Group's Rachel Chalmers gives her perspective.
Posted March 15, 2004
FTPOnline interviewed Rachel Chalmers, an analyst at The 451 Group, an analysis firm. Read about which application management vendors are making waves in this rapidly changing market.
FTPOnline: How is the area of systems management changing, with many new startups entering the application management wing and older-school vendors such as Computer Associates, IBM, and HP moving toward them?
Rachel Chalmers: One profound change has been the application of Bayesian mathematics to network and application performance problems. Thomas Bayes was an 18th century English mathematician and theologian who came up with a mathematical rule explaining how you should modify your beliefs about a system in light of new evidence about that system. It's a subtle and powerful notion now being applied to everything from clinical drug trials to spam filters—it underpins the popular and successful SpamAssassin.
Bayesian inference gives you a way to think about information you don't know yet. Obviously it's a good way to tackle all kinds of problems in complex physical systems such as networks and applications. Companies such as Peakstone and Altaworks are exploring the application of Bayesian mathematics to multivariable performance problems with—maybe predictably—highly variable results.
Larger Vendors Playing Catch-Up
FTPOnline: Are the larger vendors catching up in terms of their ability to track application-level (as opposed to system-level) changes and problems?
Rachel Chalmers: Larger vendors are catching up the way large vendors usually catch up—that is, by acquiring the best technologies they can afford. Mercury Interactive bought a company called Performant, which grew out of a University of
Washington consulting gig to performance-tweak the terabyte database containing Boeing's 777 fly-through simulations. Quest Software bought a [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition] J2EE expert company called Sitraka, and Veritas came pounding into the application market by buying the publicly traded Precise Software Solutions.
FTPOnline: Which of the new startups have the most potential to shake up the status quo? Which are the most innovative? How do they differentiate themselves?
Rachel Chalmers: In application performance and diagnostics, ProactiveNet Software and Wily Technology are fairly determined to go public if they possibly can; that would shake up some of the incumbents. Altaworks, Panacya, and ProactiveNet all have interesting takes on the dynamic thresholding or baselining problem, where their software learns in real time the application's normal operating parameters and then notifies managers when behavior falls outside that normal range. In fact, ProactiveNet has patents on various pieces of this approach, and believes Panacya might be in violation.
The performance vendors also differentiate themselves on which technologies they can tackle. Many are J2EE deep dives, but others, like Heroix, play on the Windows side, or like Cyanea Systems, hook into CICS and IMS back ends. Still others, such as Covalent Technologies and Fidelia Technology, grew out of the Linux and Apache environments.
Another dimension of the problem no one is yet tackling well is the human-computer interface issue: how to make sense of all that aggregated data. Various companies are trying to "percolate" or "bubble up" the most significant alerts and incidents, but it's a fundamentally intractable chore. A third dimension gaining importance daily is figuring out what you actually have installed—a much harder question to automate than it sounds. Companies such as Appilog, Cendura, Collation, Entuity, Intersperse, mValent, Relicore, Troux Technologies, and VIEO are doing interesting work here.
Then there are the datacenter automation vendors such as BladeLogic,
Centrata, Opsware, and Verbatix; database monitors such as BEZ Systems, Embarcadero Technologies, and Lecco Technology; network performance vendors such as ASG Software Solutions, Brix Networks, Compuware, Concord Communications, Empirix, Euclid, Lucent Technologies, Micromuse, NetScout Systems, NetQoS, Silas Technologies, Tonic Software, and Visual Networks; and service-level monitors such as Aprisma, InfoVista, Managed Objects, Packeteer, Sitara Networks, and System Management ARTS (SMARTS).
The moral, such as it is, is that the performance or operations person's job is so incredibly hard that if you can automate even half of it, enterprises will beat a path to your door. No wonder so many entrepreneurs think management software could make them rich. They're right.
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