Room For Improvement

Early results from this week's poll that, in spite of some vendor progress in creating applications and services that take a more predictive approach to management, IT managers still say the available tools have them working mostly in a reactive mode. A scant 29 percent of the respondents said that management applications and services have made real strides in recent years to becoming more proactive while 57 percent said their enterprise management apps have them doing too much troubleshooting after-the-fact.At least part of the problem isn't with the capabilities of the tools and services themselves, but with the premium price so many of the more sophisticated solutions carry. Thirty-six percent of the respondents acknowledged that the tools may actually now included capabilities that would allow them to identify potential network, system, and application issues before they become full-blown problems but they are priced out of their budget range.

Vendors are hearing the call for more affordable solutions, and I expect we will begin to see services and products offered at a more realitic pricing model as we go forward. However, enterprises continue to face difficult choices as to what they want to spend their constrained budgets on. And with pressure on IT to pursue often initiatives in areas such as mobility where there are an influx of useful but often expensive devices that still need to be managed, sometimes IT finds its focus shifted away from taking care of the basics. Drop me a line at [email protected] and let me know what you think.