Management World 2010 – “A Tale of Two Topics”

By Steve Hateley, Director of Product Marketing, InfoVista

A gentle stroll around the newly relocated exhibition this year brought forward a realisation that apparently EVERYONE in the OSS market now provides Service Assurance…incredible!

In my last ten years at these events, you could expect to see the IBM-Micromuse-Netcool and EMC domination of fault management plus InfoVista and CA holding ground on the performance front, but with the blurring of Enterprise and Service Provider tool markets, evolution of Web2.0, and a need for probes to do more than just “probe”, Providers really are struggling to dig through the weeds to find a solution that truly matches their requirements.

So if Service Assurance was hot topic number one, the second really had to be the weather forecast — or should I say “Cloud”…

Hype, hype – hooray

Reading the Light Reading commentary “Mgmt World: Vendor Caution Overshadows the Cloud,” I realized that it concurred with the analyst discussions I had this week. There is plenty of talk about Cloud to generate a marketing buzz, but in many ways it will all start from evolved VPN and managed services — going through the stages of application-awareness, WAN Optimization, Hosted Communications and Applications (making the MSP a broker for third party applications and content) and of course a flat and consolidated All-IP infrastructure that encompasses network and the data centre. These are the fundamentals or “under the hood” as I referred to it this week. You need to get the management of this right before you start “getting cloudy”.

Many of our extensive MSP customers are only now starting to consider and implement the Application-Aware VPN. The remainder will follow as and when the Enterprise hit realisation that “managing data and communications is getting too complex.” A few of our customers are touting “Cloud Services,” but at the moment these are the early adopters and innovators who have a perceived good visibility into their Data Centre and Network Infrastructures – plus good software, content and application partner relationships. Others that claim to be “doing cloud” are actually just offering glorified SaaS and Hosted Data Centre Services that have been around for a while, in some shape or form.

At this time, InfoVista is adopting a pragmatic approach to Cloud, in that we have evolved our MSP management capability extensively over the last year, developing and extending our converged NPM and APM offering. We will shortly be supporting Hosted Unified Communications and in the coming year will be consolidating the management of Network and Data Centre Infrastructure to a single “platform.” All of the analysts (from IDC, Gartner, Yankee, Heavy Reading, Frost & Sullivan and Infonetics) acknowledged that this was a sensible approach for the time being and until requirements have been clearly identified.