The Ones to Watch (Continued)

An Advantage in No Hardware Agenda
FTPOnline: Are vendors without hardware, such as CA or BMC Software, at a disadvantage compared to IBM, HP, and Sun?

Rachel Chalmers: No. IBM, HP, and Sun are seen, not without justice, as selling management technology as a sweetener to move their overpriced hardware. To put it another way, the fads for reducing total cost of ownership by server consolidation or resource pooling or (insert buzzword here) are in fact different ways for the systems shops to pay penance to their enterprise customers who bought too much hardware during the boom, and who are now trying to make better use of it.

This gives a BMC or a Veritas an advantage, in that they are seen as having no particular hardware agenda. CA is another story; it suffers from a long history of buying failing companies and milking their installed bases dry. CA's executive team says those days are over, but it's the rare CIO whose heart does not sink when a trusted vendor is acquired by CA.

FTPOnline: What are some other large vendors to watch? Veritas or Microsoft?

Rachel Chalmers: Veritas is a fascinating newcomer to this market, and all the incumbents are watching it with trepidation. Its Precise Software acquisition was shrewd.

Microsoft is bound to come looking for application performance sooner or later, and the players on the .NET side of the house must be worried about that. I'm also interested in Mercury Interactive, which is turning Topaz into a force to be reckoned with.

Top Goals for Operations Management Software
FTPOnline: What are the top goals for operations management software? Improving performance? Managing service-level agreements? Faster problem-solving in systems and networks?

Rachel Chalmers:Yes, yes, and yes. Which is the top priority depends on whom you talk to. Every test center and [network operations center] NOC has a subtly different problem causing the boss to tear his hair out. All these problems need to be solved, yesterday.

FTPOnline: How do you decide on needs vs. complexity of product offerings?

Rachel Chalmers: If only there were an easy way! The only way not to get burned is to begin the vendor selection process with a deep knowledge of the problem domain. First, understand the problem you need to solve. Then invite the likeliest suspects in for a bake-off.

FTPOnline: Most of the problems with large, distributed applications occur not during development but in deployment. What can be done to address this problem?

Rachel Chalmers: Unfortunately, there's no silver bullet. The only way forward is the hard way: better development processes, better test and quality assurance thanks to more complete and accurate staging environments, and better post-deployment monitoring and test tools.

FTPOnline: While client/server tools are mature, IT managers often complain that managing distributed objects in production environments is difficult, and the tools aren't yet up to it. What needs to be done, and whose tools show promise?

Rachel Chalmers: There's a difficult engineering tradeoff to be made between heavyweight agents that pull a lot of useful information out of objects, while exacting a substantial performance hit, and so-called agentless approaches, which don't get as much information but don't slow things down as badly, either. Again, everyone solves this problem in a slightly different way. From the buyer's point of view, it's horses for courses: deep dives like Wily in quality assurance and testing, perhaps, with a lighter-weight approach post-deployment.

Many people criticize Wily for being an application-server deep dive, but Wily has a great comeback: Those who criticize the deep dive, can't deep dive.

About Rachel Chalmers
Rachel Chalmers covers Web services and software platforms as an analyst for The 451 Group. She specifically follows areas such as Java, 3-D modeling and graphics, Web application servers, Linux and open-source software, embedded operating systems and databases, Web services standards, and distributed application management.