Systems Management On Call

The cost of managing IT infrastructures often outstrips acquisition costs, and users increasingly are frustrated with the complexity of many traditional systems-management platforms. That's why some vendors are looking at alternative delivery and pricing models that could bring utility-style frameworks to the forefront during the next year.

Although still in the fledgling stage, systems management as a service is being offered through hosted environments and a utility-based, pay-as-you go model. Systems-management providers also are looking to tie their services and products more directly to overall infrastructure performance.

"Companies are spending over $10 billion a year on systems-management software to manage technology they've already bought," says Mike Maples, a co-founder and strategy officer of service-management software vendor Motive Inc. "And you've got hundreds of vendors selling products that very often have been overpromised and underdelivered."

For the past seven years, Motive has been providing systems management as a service, though it has taken a different approach than vendors are taking today: The company's management services are generally built in, co-branded, and delivered over the Internet through independent software vendors. Motive's objective is to build manageability into applications as they're delivered, as opposed to layering on management products after the fact. "Software-as-a-service pricing and consumption models are driven by a need to more closely tie dollars spent on technology to actual value realized and the amount of technology used in a given period of time," Maples says.

Motive's primary offerings are Profile, Triage, and Resolution. Profile is used to discover and automate configuration information and performance. Triage lets companies use information received from software applications to assign predetermined and automated response mechanisms to diagnose and fix problems as they occur. Resolution augments Triage with a more-detailed set of diagnostic capabilities and automated repair capabilities.Siebel Systems Inc. is integrating Motive's Profile into its customer-resource-management applications, says Arun Balaraman, group director of architecture and product marketing at Siebel. The use of Profile will help Siebel achieve a goal of providing self-managing applications to its customer base, he says.

Siebel's applications must be closely integrated with databases, directory servers, Web servers, and other applications. "We want to make sure we provide configuration management directly in our applications, so that when customers make initial deployments, we can ensure they're using the right software versions, and the right parameters are set in the environment for optimal performance," Balaraman says.

Also, having Motive integrated into Siebel applications will allow Siebel users to get periodic snapshots of configuration settings and changes. "The goal is self-managing," Balaraman says. "We're moving away from traditional systems management and more to a systems-level view of the different entities that make up an environment."Looking at systems management as part of the up-front process of developing applications will lead to a change in how systems management is delivered, says David Hamilton, director of the Windows and enterprise-management division at Microsoft. "Software companies focusing on management is the way of the future, rather than management vendors building after-the-fact solutions," Hamilton says. "But it's going to take a long time for any change to happen in the management space."

Systems management as a service is on the blade of the proverbial hockey-stick growth curve, says Richard Ptak, an analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates. "There's not going to be an explosion, but demand definitely exists, and once it proves itself, it's going to take off dramatically," Ptak says.

Hewlett-Packard is evaluating two models for delivery of its management and software products as a service, says Nora Denzel, senior VP of the adaptive enterprise and software group at HP. Shared Application Utility Services and Market-Based Resource Management both are being used internally and with select customers, and HP expects to begin seeing greater use beginning late this year, she says. "Customers want to pay only for what they use, and we need really sophisticated pricing strategies," Denzel says. "Going forward, we'll see more variable-pricing choices that are more aligned with rental models, rather than one-time fixed-cost models."Still, not all users are crazy about that idea. The Cancer Therapy Research Center, a nonprofit outpatient and cancer-research facility in San Antonio, relies on management capabilities built into the software and hardware it purchases for its infrastructure, which includes about 35 servers. "We're always looking for better opportunities to streamline and make our organization more productive, but we have mixed emotions about pay-per-use scenarios," says Mike Luter, chief technology officer at the Cancer Therapy Research Center. "We've looked at certain vendors that allow for that sort of thing, but I'm not sure we're convinced you really save what you think is possible going in."

BMC Software Inc. plans to launch a utility-based systems-management platform later this month. Jay Gardner is so convinced of the potential for the platform that earlier this year he stepped down as CIO of the company to become general manager of the new offering, to be called BMC OnDemand. Working with third-party independent software vendors, BMC plans to provide monitoring of enterprise applications, as well as database management. "There are predictions that as much as a third of all new software will be delivered through an on-demand model within the next five years," Gardner says. "That translates into many billions of dollars in market opportunities."

Customers will engage the ISVs for BMC's systems-management services, so there will be no server or software licenses associated with the ingrained BMC offerings, Gardner says. BMC systems-management products will be priced on a per-user, per-month basis to the independent software vendor. "The end user doesn't even need to know there's software behind this," Gardner says. "They're buying the service." Going forward, he says, customers will increasingly demand that systems management be viewed as part of a given application, with pricing fixed to the overall value of the total service.

Donna Scott, an analyst at research firm Gartner, agrees. "Systems management is becoming an under-the-waterline thing," she says. "That doesn't mean it's not important. Systems management really is becoming an issue of overall quality of overall service."

Illustration by Otto Steininger0