Yowzah - open source management in the enterprise
It's a Monday so its time to invent a new acronym - or is it an abbreviation. Today it's YAOSA - "yet another open source application." Perhaps it won't reach the level of
TANSTAAFL and
NIMBY, but it may have legs.
The reason for the new acronym? A week or so ago, a bunch of admittedly smaller management software companies
announced their intention to form the Open Management Consortium (OMC - that'll be last week's abbreviation then, or is it an acronym?) . No doubt the initial impulse is pure - to federate and integrate, provide a common platform, etc, etc. But as
Michael Cote remarks, the bigger players (IBM, HP, BMC, CA) should be in no doubt that they are being challenged. The organisations involved each offer one piece of the framework - there is no pressure to take the whole kaboodle, apparently, but users will benefit from a common interface between the tools.
I don't know much about the politics, but from the enterprise perspective my take is that any move towards integration and/or standardisation has to be a good thing. There are several initiatives at the moment and I would see this as one of them, there are others such as the planned convergence between WSDM and WS-Management being led by the
management gorillas and Microsoft, or the
CMDB interoperability efforts of the four-plus-Fujitsu. Such initiatives may be making waves in the vendor community, but apart from a few people in end-user companies that possibly should get out more, there is little interest in the waypoints on the road to standards utopia. Quite rightly, they believe standardisation is a vendor issue, and wouldn't it be nice when its finished.
From the enterprise perspective, the main areas that integration and standardisation can help today are:
- the lowest level of the IT management technology stack - event management, configuration management, performance management of individual resources - so that management of the basics becomes the norm rather than the exception. The open source approach may help to lower the barriers to entry, in terms of both price and feasibility, bringing more assets into the sphere of integrated management
- across the IT management technology stack - standards can help in providing the glue between management capabilities. Integration is the biggest issue facing management, and (as mentioned) we wait with baited breath for vendors to settle on, and agree a single, comprehensive communications framework for all management tools.
I can see open source benefiting the former, but the latter needs to be led by a consortium of the main players: there's no point in the open source world running off and developing its own set of standards. There are too many reasons to list why the gorillas are not going to be knocked off their perches any day soon (a mixed metaphor, but it conjures and image, doesn't it?), not least because enterprise management is so mind-bogglingly complex to do, it'll take more than a bunch of wannabe companies sitting around a table to cut the gordian knot. Enterprise management vendors may have been resting on their laurels in the past but they are highly cognisant of the law of diminishing returns - the higher you go up the management stack, the harder it gets to deliver anything useful.
To date, much of the general open source debate has been about the fact that the business case for open source needs to include more than just licensing costs. I'd be very happy to see major erosion in pricing of enterprise management software but history tells us that enterprise management is about far more than this - the services piece of management implementation should not be under-estimated. If I were an enterprise customer I'd be looking to work with one of the big companies - vendors or their systems integrator partners - to help me deliver enterprise IT management, but at the same time, I'd be happy if they proposed a combination of their own products and open source products if it offered the best solution.
To conclude, I'd say to the open source guys - beware IBM, as they know how to leverage your capabilities far better than you do. Just as they have done with LAMP and WebSphere/DB2, IBM will jump on this as an on-ramp to Tivoli, and dress it up with services. HP is adopting an inclusive stance, and looks like it could turn out to be a friend to OMC, should it choose to.
Meanwhile, pure software players BMC and CA would do well to muck in and perhaps even donate a code line or two. CA's already stepped up to the plate with Splunk; let's see what they make of OMC.
